‘You are of course aware,’ says Wyndham formally, when they have reached the drawing-room—the drawing-room that used to be his, but that now seems to slip out of his possession, as he sees the slender figure of the girl turn after his entrance, as if to receive him. ‘You are of course aware that the late Professor, Mr. Hennessy, left you three hundred a year?’ The girl, standing midway between one of the windows and Wyndham, makes a slight affirmative movement of her head. She would have spoken, but words failed her. ‘That was in accordance with his promise to you. If the experiment failed, well’—with a careless shrug—‘there was nothing. If it was successful—you were to be the gainer by it.’ His voice is clear, unemotional; there is a sort of ‘laying down the law’ about it that takes every spark of sympathy that there might have been quite out of it. ‘Yes.’ This time she manages to speak, but she colours as she speaks, and blushes very painfully; and now her eyes seek the ground. If one were to exactly describe her, one would say—but very reluctantly, I think—that she looks ashamed. ‘With three hundred a year you should be able to——’ She interrupts him. ‘It is too much—far too much,’ says she, with an effort. ‘I don’t want so much as that. Fifty pounds a year would be enough; I am sure I could——’ She stops. ‘All that is beyond question,’ says the barrister coldly. ‘It was the Professor’s wish that you should have three hundred a year, and now that he is gone, there can be no further argument about it. He has no near relations so far as I can make out, so that there is no reason why you should not accept the money left to you by him. What I came to-day for was, not about the Professor’s gift to you, but to know what you intend to do with it.’ ‘With it?’ ‘Yes; what, in fact, are you going to do?’ ‘What am I going to do?’ She looks up at him for the first time; a startled expression grows in her large dark eyes. ‘We all have a future before us,’ says Wyndham, ‘and you——’ He hesitates here, hardly knowing how to go on with those earnest eyes on his. ‘Of course I feel that, for the time being, I am in a sense bound to look after you, the Professor being an old friend of mine, and you——’ Again he stops. It seems impossible, indeed, to refer to that strange scene where he had had so prominent a part. ‘You will understand,’ says he, ‘that the Professor wished you to be placed in an assured position, and he left me to see to that.’ Here the girl makes a sharp movement of her hands descriptive of fear.