As Wantley walked along the terrace in front of the villa, past the opened windows of the Picture Room, he saw Lady Wantley sitting in her usual place. But there was about her figure, especially about her hands, which clasped and unclasped themselves across her knee, an unusual look of tension and emotion. Wantley turned, and drew nearer to the window which seemed to frame the still graceful figure. But she remained quite unconscious that she was being watched. He saw that her lips were moving; he heard her speaking, as she so often did, to herself; and there came to him the conviction that she had been down to the Beach Room, that she had seen Downing, that she had made to him an appeal foredoomed to failure. A keen desire to know whether he guessed truly, and, if so, to know what had actually taken place, warred for a moment with the young man's horror of a scene, and especially of a scene with Lady Wantley in one of her strange moods. Suddenly she raised her voice, and he heard clearly the words, uttered in low, intense tones, and as if in answer to an invisible questioner: 'But if a man come presumptuously upon his neighbour to slay him with guile, thou shalt take him from My altar, that he may die.' 'It must have been horribly painful,' said the listener to himself. He began to pity Downing. Familiarity had bred in Wantley, not contempt, but a certain indulgent pity not far removed from contempt, for what he and Mrs. Robinson, seeing eye to eye in this one matter, regarded as Lady Wantley's peculiar and slightly absurd religious vagaries. Dimly aware of this attitude, of this lack of respect for what were to herself vital truths, Lady Wantley, when in their presence, exercised greater self-control than either of them ever guessed. But now, for the moment, she was in no condition to restrain herself; and though, as he opened the door of the Picture Room, she looked round for a moment, she still continued talking aloud in apparently eager argument with some unseen presence. 'Sing ye to the Lord, for He hath triumphed gloriously. The horse and his rider hath He thrown into the sea.' She spoke with increasing excitement, and with what seemed to the hearer a strange exultation. He stopped short, and, retracing his footsteps, closed the door. It had always been tacitly agreed between himself and his cousin that Penelope's household should hear as little as was possible of Lady Wantley in these, her wilder moods. Again he went towards her. As he did so, she stood up and advanced to meet him. Her pale face was on a level with his own; her grey eyes were dilated. Something had stirred her far more deeply than she was wont to be stirred by material things. She looked, Wantley thought, inspired, exhilarated, as one might look on emerging triumphantly from some awful ordeal.