Such had been the story Wantley had to tell innumerable times--first, to the various people who had a right to know all that could be known; secondly, to the numerous folk, whose interest, if idle, was eager and real, and whom he felt a nervous desire to conciliate, and to make believe his version of an affair which became more than a nine days' wonder. After the bearing of the great mental strain, especially after the accomplishment of a prolonged mental task, the mind--ay, and even the body--refuse to be stilled, and call imperatively for something else to do, to go on doing. When at last the doctor had come and gone, when the first discussion with the local police had come to an end--in a word, when Wantley had repeated some five or six times the grim, simple facts to all those whom it concerned--there came to him the most painful ordeal of all, the hours spent by him in waiting for Penelope's return. After he had taken Lady Wantley up to her room, and left her there in what he trusted would remain a strange state of bewildered coma, he had come down to wander restlessly through the large rooms on the ground-floor of the villa. His mind was clouded with grotesque and sinister images, and he welcomed such interruptions as were caused by the futile, scared questions of those among the upper servants who from time to time summoned up courage to come and speak to him. While trying to occupy himself by writing letters, which he almost invariably at once destroyed after he had written them, Wantley was ever asking himself with sick anxiety, if he had done all that was in his power to protect and safeguard the two women to whom he had never felt so closely linked as now. He was haunted by the fear that he himself might unwittingly reveal what he believed to be the truth, but he would have been comforted indeed had he known how his mere outward appearance, his imperturbable face, his sleepy eyes, even his well-trimmed beard, now served his purpose. Outwardly Wantley appeared to be that day the calmest man at Monk's Eype, only so far discreetly perturbed as would naturally be any kindly and good-hearted host, whose guest had met, while under his roof, with so awful and mysterious a fate. A curious interlude in his long waiting was the sudden irruption of Penelope's old nurse. Motey found him sitting at the writing-table of what had been his predecessor's study, attempting, for the tenth time, to compose the letter which he knew must be written that night to Mr. Julius Gumberg.