The unconscious Allard pushed the bright hair from his forehead, his eyes on the ruddy unrest of the flames. "Of course I meant to tell you some time, monseigneur," he mused aloud. "But it seemed a bit cowardly to burden you with my troubles; you could not help them, and you have so many of your own. It was no time to speak of such a thing during your wedding, and as the weeks went by it grew harder and harder to speak of it at all. I tried not to betray myself, but I am rather a bad actor. If it were only I who suffered. The journey to Spain, for madame--" He paused. Stanief gazed at him with an expression as somberly dangerous as ever one of his dangerous house wore. "The journey to Spain, monsieur?" he repeated. Aroused at last to a strangeness in his manner, Allard turned to him in wonder. "During the journey to Spain, monseigneur, this came for me," he replied simply, and drew forth a letter which he laid before the other. Stanief picked it up, himself confronted by the unexpected. Allard resumed his seat and averted his head as the rustling paper unfolded. It was a sweetly calm letter, a letter written by one in the evening of life and itself breathing an evening repose and gray twilight hush. Across the fevered passion of the man who read, the first words drifted like the cool, scented air of the Californian garden from which they came. A letter that neither reproached nor questioned, its message was given with all tenderness of phrase and household name. Robert had not been well for a long time, Aunt Rose wrote most delicately. After John had left for South America so suddenly, his younger brother had fretted and chafed against his own quiet life. Even his engagement to Theodora had failed to cheer him, or cure his strange restlessness and abstraction. About six months after John's departure, he had been found unconscious on the veranda, lying among the crumpled newspapers. An illness followed, and after recovering from that he never seemed to grow quite strong. In the third year of John's absence, when preparations were being made for the long-delayed wedding, he again fell ill. The morning they received John's letter from the _Nadeja_, he rallied wonderfully. Asking to have the letter himself, he read it again and again, then sent them all away while he rested. An hour later they had found him, resting indeed, his cheek upon the letter and the old bright content on his boyish face. Theodora had borne it very well. They were tranquilly calm in their life together, now, and sent their earnest love to John in the distant life he had chosen. Stanief laid down the letter very gently. He never forgot how the light from this purer and simpler world fell across the labyrinth of dark thoughts at which he scarcely dared look back.