"God knows!" came from her brokenly. He put his lips on her hair, and she shivered. "It is 'Yes,' then," said he; "but pity me still more, and say that it shall be at once." "No," she sobbed, "I must have time to think. It is too much, after all--" At that moment Mrs. Mordaunt entered. Violet, aroused by the opening door, stood up with a bent head, an averted face, and Van Hupfeldt said, with a sort of frenzied laugh, to Mrs. Mordaunt: "See how the days are lengthening out already." Mrs. Mordaunt looked at Violet with a query in her glance; and Violet's great eyes dwelt on her mother without answering by any sign that question of lifted eyebrows. The girl was puzzled and overwrought. Was it so that men won women, that some man had won her sister? Surely this was a strange wooing! CHAPTER VIII AT DEAD OF NIGHT David Harcourt, meantime, had long since reached home after his interview with Miss L'Estrange, whereupon Mrs. Grover had presented him with her first specimen of housewifery in the shape of a lunch. But, as if to prove that the fates were against literature that day, she also presented him with a letter from the agent Dibbin, saying: "Herein please find address of Sarah Gissing, servant of the late Miss Gwendoline Barnes, as promised." David's first impulse was to go straightway after the meal to interview this Sarah Gissing. Then he set his lips, saying to himself: "The day's work," and, after lighting his pipe, he walked up to his literary tools with the grimness of a man about to throttle an enemy. Whereupon he sat down and wrote something. When he came back to earth with a weary but taut brain, Mrs. Grover was gone for the day. It was near seven in the evening, and the prairie-wolf within was growling "Dinner-time." His mental faculties being now on a tension, he thought to himself that there was no reason why he should not be prompt, and call upon Miss Gissing that evening. Though, after dinner, a mortal lethargy and reaction seized upon him with the whisper, "To-morrow is better than to-day," he proved true to his high-strung self, and went by bus to Baker-St., where he took train for the station nearest the village of Chalfont. It was a sharp walk from station to village. There was no cab; and when he arrived at the Peacock Inn, where Sarah Gissing was now a barmaid, he learned that she was away on leave at a neighboring village. He strolled about the silent street until Sarah came home at ten o'clock, a thin girl, with projecting top teeth, and a chronic stare of wonderment in her eyes. "You are not to be alarmed," David said to her. "I only came to ask you a few questions about your late mistress, Miss Gwendoline Barnes, in whom I have an interest. No one will be harmed, as far as I am aware, by your telling me all that you know, while you and I may profit by it."