“Oh, no surmise at all. I speak of what I know.” “And so do I.” And yet again she repeated: “Una will be waiting for you.” He sighed, and stiffened slightly. “Of course if you insist,” said he, and made ready to reconduct her. She swung round as if to go, but checked, and looked him frankly in the eyes. “Why will you for ever be misunderstanding me?” she challenged him. “Perhaps it is the inevitable result of my overanxiety to understand.” “Then begin by taking me more literally, and do not read into my words more meaning than I intend to give them. When I say Una is waiting for you, I state a simple fact, not a command that you shall go to her. Indeed I want first to talk to you.” “If I might take you literally now--” “Should I have suffered you to bring me here if I did not?” “I beg your pardon,” he said, contrite, and something shaken out of his imperturbability. “Sylvia,” he ventured very boldly, and there checked, so terrified as to be a shame to his brave scarlet, gold-laced uniform. “Yes?” she said. She was leaning upon the balcony again, and in such a way now that he could no longer see her profile. But her fingers were busy at the pearls once more, and this he saw, and seeing, recovered himself. “You have something to say to me?” he questioned in his smooth, level voice. Had he not looked away as he spoke he might have observed that her fingers tightened their grip of the pearls almost convulsively, as if to break the rope. It was a gesture slight and trivial, yet arguing perhaps vexation. But Tremayne did not see it, and had he seen it, it is odds it would have conveyed no message to him. There fell a long pause, which he did not venture to break. At last she spoke, her voice quiet and level as his own had been. “It is about Una.” “I had hoped,” he spoke very softly, “that it was about yourself.” She flashed round upon him almost angrily. “Why do you utter these set speeches to me?” she demanded. And then before he could recover from his astonishment to make any answer she had resumed a normal manner, and was talking quickly. She told him of Una’s premonitions about Dick. Told him, in short, what it was that Una desired to talk to him about. “You bade her come to me?” he said. “Of course. After your promise to me.” He was silent and very thoughtful for a moment. “I wonder that Una needed to be told that she had in me a friend,” he said slowly. “I wonder to whom she would have gone on her own impulse?” “To Count Samoval,” Miss Armytage informed him. “Samoval!” he rapped the name out sharply. He was clearly angry. “That man! I can’t understand why O’Moy should suffer him about the house so much.” “Terence, like everybody else, will suffer anything that Una wishes.” “Then Terence is more of a fool than I ever suspected.”