Yet he did not eat, and Unity knew that his heart was not in his food. It was elsewhere. He was unhappy. He had been unhappy for some time. Two lines had come between the corners of his lips and his chin, and there was a queer, pained look in his eyes. A far lesser-hearted and weaker-brained thing in petticoats than Unity would have known that John loved the radiant princess of Wonderland. Unity dreamed of it--the love between her king and her princess. Of herself she scarcely thought. Her humility--not without its pride and beauty--placed her far beneath them both. Her king was suffering. The feminine in her put aside such reasons as would have occurred to the unintuitive male--business cares, disappointed ambition, internal pain, or discomfort. He was suffering; he went about with a mountain of care on his brow that made her heart ache; he answered remarks at random; he had no appetite for the dish he adored--lamb-chops _en casserole_, which she had learned to make from a recipe in “The Daily Mirror.” He was pining away for love of Stellamaris. So deeply engaged was Unity with these thoughts that it was not until she had switched on the light in her bedroom and was preparing to undress that she remembered, with a pang of dismay, that the Olympian tobacco box (old pewter, a present years ago from Herold), one of her own peculiar and precious cares, was empty. She went down-stairs to the store-cupboard, where she hoarded the tobacco and, with it in her hand, she proceeded to the study, and opened the door softly. Her guardian, her king of men, her beginning and end of existence, sat in his writing-chair, his head bowed on his arms, folded on the table. A blank sheet of paper lay on the blotter. She saw that his great shoulders shook. As he did not hear her enter, she stole on tiptoe to the table, and laid the packet of tobacco on the corner. She tiptoed back to the door, and turned and stayed there for a moment, watching him, soul-racked with futile longing to bring him comfort. She caught muffled words. She knew in her heart that nothing she could do would be of any avail. In an instinctive gesture she stretched out her hands piteously toward the bowed head and went out of the room, noiselessly closing the door behind her. That night, she cried as she had never cried before, not even when hot irons had seared her flesh. An hour or so afterwards John Risca put out the lights in his study and went up-stairs to bed. He could not sleep, and he thought, after the poor, but human, manner of men, not so much of the killing of the thing he loved, as of the unimaginable, intolerable blank in his own life when the thing he loved should be killed. In the morning he said to himself, “She has got my letter,” and fell into a frenzy of speculation.