She struggled to break from him, but he held her fast. "We needn't wait for Kitty to come back," he said. "No." The door had opened immediately before he spoke and Kitty herself came quickly into the room. "No," she answered him. "You needn't wait for me to come back. I returned yesterday." "Kitty!" With a cry like some tortured captive thing Nan wrenched herself free and fled to Kitty's side. "Kitty! Tell him--tell him I can't marry him now! Not yet--oh, I can't!" Kitty patted her arm reassuringly. "Don't worry," she answered. Then she turned to Roger. "Your wedding will have to be postponed, Roger," she said Quietly. "Nan's uncle died early this morning." She watched the tense anger and suspicion die swiftly out of his eyes. The death of a relative, necessarily postponing Nan's marriage, appealed to that curious conventional strain in him, inherited from Lady Gertrude. "Lord St. John dead?" he repeated. "Nan, why didn't you tell me? I should have understood if I'd known that. I wouldn't have worried you." He was full of shocked contrition and remorse. Kitty felt she had been disingenuous. But she had sheltered Nan from the cave-man that dwelt in Roger--oddly at variance with the streak of conventionality which lodged somewhere in his temperamental make-up. And she was quite sure that, if Lord St. John knew, he would be glad that his death should have succoured Nan, just as in life he had always sought to serve her. "I want Nan to come and stay with me for a time," pursued Kitty steadily, on the principle of striking while the iron is hot. "Later on I'll bring her down to Mallow, and later still we can talk about the wedding. You'll have to wait some months, Roger." He assented, and Nan, realising that it was his mother in him, for the moment uppermost, making these concessions to convention, felt conscious of a wild hysterical desire to burst out laughing. She made a desperate effort to control herself. The room seemed to be growing very dark. Far away in the sky--no, it must be the ceiling--she could see the electric lights burning ever more and more dimly as the waves of darkness surged round her, rising higher and higher. "But there's honour, dear, and duty. . . ." Peter's words floated up to her on the shadowy billows which swayed towards her. "Honour! Duty!" There was a curious singing in her head. It sounded like the throb of a myriad engines, rhythmically repeating again and again: "Honour! Duty! Honour! Duty!" The words grew fainter, vaguer, trailing off into a regular pulsation that beat against her ears. "_Honour_!" She thought she said it very loudly. But all that Kitty and Roger heard was a little moan as Nan slipped to the ground in a dead faint. CHAPTER XXVIII GOOD-BYE!