Jack hesitated, but she gave him another look, and he obeyed. Within five minutes Rhoda was sitting with her tea-cup in her hand, Lady Sarah was beside her, and Jack was returning along the terrace with Sir Robert. When she was alone with the other lady, Rhoda seized the opportunity to say: “I’m sorry I cried out as I did, but----” She could not go on, and after a pause, Lady Sarah finished her sentence for her. “The sight of a scar or wound distresses you. I understand. Some people are very sensitive to anything like that. But it’s not really painful now, you know. At the moment it happened I thought it must be, for it looked so dreadful. But even then I think perhaps I suffered more at the sight of the wound than Jack did himself.” “Yes.” Lady Sarah turned quickly to her husband, who was now in sight. “Bertie,” she said, “Tell Miss Pembury how Jack cut his hand.” Rhoda rose quickly from her chair. “Oh, no,” she said hastily, “I don’t want to hear any more, really.” But Lady Sarah insisted. “You must,” she said, with peremptoriness, which betrayed the importance she attached to the apparently small matter. Sir Robert was not at all pleased at his wife’s question, recalling an episode in his life which he would fain have forgotten. “He put his hand through a window,” he said briefly, “and the mark shows still, as I dare say you have noticed, Miss Pembury.” Rhoda said “Yes” under her breath, but there was still upon her face a dazed look of incredulity which irritated Lady Sarah. The girl took the first opportunity of escaping upstairs, but she was in no state to amuse little Caryl, so she hastened to her own room, locked herself in, and sitting down, breathless and trembling, on a chair near the window, gave herself up to her distress, her doubts and her fears. What did it mean? What could it mean but one thing? There stood out clearly in her recollection the remembrance of the terrible night of her escape from the Mill-house, and the sight of the moonlight streaming on the hand with the red wound across it. That the hand she had seen that night was the hand of Jack Rotherfield she was quite sure. Her impression of the red mark she had seen that night was so strong, that nothing would have shaken her in this conviction. True, it was difficult to understand the story she had just heard, and wholly impossible to believe that Sir Robert was not telling the truth when he said he had seen the hand gashed by the broken window.