"I hope nothing more exciting will happen then than to-night!" Annesley exclaimed, with a kindly glance at her companion. She pitied him, but she pitied herself more, for by and by she and Knight would have to talk this thing out together. For the first time she dreaded the moment of being alone with her husband. There was a stain of clay on the feet of her idol, and though she had helped him to hide it from other eyes, nothing could be right between them again until she had told him what she thought--until he had promised to make restitution somehow of the thing he should never have possessed. CHAPTER XIX THE SECRET Knight and Annesley had a suite of rooms on the ground floor in what was known as "the new wing" at Valley House. On the floor above were the rooms occupied by Lord and Lady Annesley-Seton. This wing was a dreadful anachronism, shocking to architects, for it had been tacked on to the house in the eighteenth century by some member of the family who had made the "grand tour" and fallen in love with Italy. Seeing no reason why a classic addition with a high-pillared loggia should be unsuitable to a house in England built in Elizabethan and Jacobean days, he had made it. Fortunately it was so situated as not to be seen from the front of the building, or anywhere else except from the one side which it deformed; and there a more artistic grandson had hidden the abortion as much as possible by planting a grove of beautiful stone-pines. As for the wing itself, the interior was the most "liveable" part of the house, and with the modern improvements put in to please the American bride before her fortune vanished, it had become charming within. Annesley's bedroom and her husband's adjoining had long windows opening out on the loggia and looking between tall, straight trunks of umbrella pines toward the distant sea. It was late before she could slip away to her own quarters, for she had been wanted for bridge, an amusement which she secretly thought the last refuge for the mentally destitute. She had told her maid not to sit up; and she was thankful to close the door of the small corridor or vestibule which led into the suite, knowing that until Knight came she would be alone. She wanted him to come, and meant to wait (it did not matter how long) until they could have that talk she wished for yet dreaded intensely. Meanwhile, however, it was good to have a few minutes in which to compose her mind, to decide whether she should begin, or expect Knight to do so; and how she could frankly let him see her state of mind without seeming too harsh, too relentless, to the man who had given her happiness with both hands--the only real happiness she had ever known.