But those two or three days at the hotel had surprised everybody, even to his valet and the house servants; and now Sir Paul was also asking for an explanation. What a web of falsehood and deceit he was weaving around him! "There were some slight repairs to be done," he said, "and some alterations afterwards, so I had to go out." "Then I wonder you did not come down here. The business you had to do might have been postponed." He could make no answer to this, and it came as a relief to him when a servant announced that Miss Raughton would see him in the drawing-room. Only, he reflected as he went to her, if she, too, should question him as her father had done, he must go mad! CHAPTER X. When he saw the girl he loved so much rise wan and pale from the couch on which she had been seated waiting for his coming, his heart sank within him. How she must have suffered! he thought. What an awful blow Cundall's death must have been to her to make her look as she looked now, as she rose and stood before him! "My darling Ida," he said, as he went towards her and took her in his arms and kissed her, "how ill and sad you look!" She yielded to his embrace and returned his kiss, but it seemed to him as if her lips were cold and lifeless. "Oh, Gervase!" she said, as she sank back to the couch wearily, "oh, Gervase! you do not know the horror that is upon me. And it is a double horror because at the time of his death, I knew of it." "What!" he said, springing to his feet from the chair he had taken beside her. "What!" "I saw it all," she said, looking at him with large distended eyes, eyes made doubly large by the hollows round them. "I saw it all, only----" "Only what, Ida?" "Only it was in a dream! A dream that I had, almost at the very hour he was treacherously stabbed to death." As she spoke she leant forward a little towards him, with her eyes still distended; leant forward gazing into his face; and as she did so he felt the blood curdling in his veins! "This," he said, trying to speak calmly, "is madness, a frenzy begotten of your state of mind at hearing----" "It is no frenzy, no madness," she said, speaking in a strange, monotonous tone, and still with the intent gaze in her hazel eyes. "No, it is the fact. On that night--that night of death--he stood before me once again and bade me farewell for ever in this world, and then I saw--oh, my God!--his murderer spring upon him, and----" "And that murderer was?" her lover interrupted, quivering with excitement.