Our rooms were airless, and Essie allowed me to establish her in a wicker armchair under a chestnut tree in the old-fashioned inn garden still brave with Michaelmas daisies and purple asters. The gleaming autumn morning had a touch of frost in it. I wrapped her fur motor cloak round her, and put her little hat on her head. She remained passive in my hands in a kind of stupor. Perhaps that might be the effect of the sedative I told myself. But I knew it was not so. Essie was drinking her cup of anguish to the dregs. She did not rebel against it. She accepted her fate with dumb docility. She was not bearing it. She was not capable of an effort of any kind. She underwent it in silence. I told her to try to sleep again, and she smiled wanly at me and obediently closed her eyes. As I went into the house to snatch an hour's rest and pack I turned and looked back at her motionless figure sunk down in her chair, her little grey face, pinched and thin like a squirrel's against the garish hotel cushion, her nerveless hands lying half open, palm upwards on her knee. A faint breeze stirred, and from the yellow tree a few large fronded leaves of amber and crimson eddied slowly down, and settled, one on her breast and the others in the grass at her feet. She saw them not. She heeded them not. She heeded nothing. Her two worlds had clashed together, and the impact had broken both. They lay in ruins round her. And so I looked for the last time on Essie. * * * * * Reader, I thought I could write this story to the end, but the pen shakes in my hand. The horror of it rushes back upon me. Ted's surprise at hearing that the Duke had gone to Essie in the garden, and that he had persuaded her to drive with him to London. Then his growing anxiety and continually reiterated conviction that we should find her in London, his uncomprehending fury when we reached London and--she was not there. And then at last his tardy realisation and desolation. I did what little I could to blunt the edge of his suffering when the first fever fit of rage was past. "Dear Ted, she did not like the house. She told me she could not live in it." "But she would have liked it when I had gutted it. I should have transformed it entirely. Electric light, bathrooms, central heating, radiators, dinner lift, luggage lift," Ted's voice broke down, and struggled on in a strangled whisper. "Inglenooks, cosy corners, speaking tubes, telephone, large French windows to the floor. She would not have known it again." He hid his face in his hands. I almost wished the paroxysms of anger back again. "Oh! Beatrice, to leave me for another man when we were so happy together, because of a house; and an entire stranger, whom she did not want even to speak to, whom she was positively rude to. It could not have been our little tiff, could it? She must have been mad."