It had been a blow to open the box brought to his room by the maid without a word of explanation--no lighter because it was deserved. It was only less severe than had the wedding ring been with the rest. And perhaps, Knight reflected, it would have been there had Annesley known of another trick played upon her: those cleverly "reconstructed" pearls, gleaming ropes of them, and paste diamonds added to her collection only for the purpose of disappearing in the "burglary." A hateful trick, but he had believed it necessary at the time, while despising it. Well, he was punished for everything at last--everything vile he had done and thought in his whole life; even those things the White Rose did not know! He was young still, but he felt old--old in sin and old in hopelessness; for youth cannot exist in a heart deprived of hope. It seemed to Knight that his heart had been deprived of hope for years, yet suddenly he recalled the fact that a few moments before--up to the time when he had begun counting his sins one by one, like the devil's rosary--he had been thinking with something akin to hope of the future. "What if, after all----" he began to ask himself. But stumbling unseeingly from avenue to path, and path to lawn, he had wandered near the house. By what seemed to him a strange coincidence he had come to a standstill almost on the spot where he had stood last night when Annesley, at her window, called him in. She had loved him then! She had called him in to be forgiven. But her forgiveness, divine as it was, white and wide-winged as the flight of a dove--had not been wide enough to cover his guilt. What a ghastly difference between last night and this! It was right that the face of the moon, so bright then, should be veiled with ragged black clouds. And yet, what if---- The man's eyes strained through the darkness of that dark hour before the dawn. "If her window is uncurtained, I'll take it as a good omen," he said. Noiselessly his feet trod the short, wet grass, going nearer to the shadowed loggia to make sure.... The curtains were drawn closely, and the window was shut. CHAPTER XXII DESTINY AND THE WALDOS After the cablegram came, calling them to America, it took the Nelson Smiths an incredibly short time to wind up their affairs and to break the ties--many and intricate as the clinging tendrils of a vine--which attached them to England. Of course, as their friends pointed out, it wasn't as if they had had a home of their own. Luckily for them--unluckily for the Annesley-Setons--they had taken the Portman Square house only month by month. And in Devonshire they had been but paying--dearly paying!--guests, as the world surmised. Everyone protested that they would be dreadfully missed, and begged to know their plans, and whether Mr. Nelson Smith's business on the other side (something to do with mines, wasn't it?) would not be finished, so that they might come back in time for Henley and Cowes?