She heard the clatter of plates behind her. The maid-servant, as no one had rung, had come unsummoned with old Ferdinand to clear the table. She thought of Kaete and of that other creature, in whose arms he had made a mock of her and of her faith in him. She dragged her lifeless legs upstairs to the only room in the house where she ever felt at home. As she passed she heard the colonel raving in his bedroom, and almost running as he paced up and down. "Let him rave!" she thought indifferently. Next she heard him give orders from behind the closed door for the carriage to come round. "He may stay or go, for all I care," she thought. She stepped on to the balcony. The icy-cold sensation that still stiffened her neck crept down her arms to her finger tips. Over there sat Walter, employing his leisure as usual in deep study of the great Encyclopaedia of Agriculture. He lifted his hand every now and then wearily to his brow and knocked the ash from his cigarette against a flower-pot without looking up. He hadn't time to look up. Good God! Confronted by this abominable farce, enacted solely with the object of deceiving her, Lilly was seized with such mad, accusing fury that she was rendered almost senseless. A pricking and stinging ran through her benumbed arms. Then an excruciating burning fever throbbed painfully in her temples and hung a blood-red curtain before her eyes. She saw nothing more, heard nothing more. She rushed down the stairs, tore back the bolt of the garden door, sprang down the terrace steps, and flew like mad across the lawn to the bailiff's lodge. What did she care whether anyone saw her or not? At this moment she minded nothing. She didn't so much as knock at his door, but opened it with a vigour that sent it swinging against the wall. A hateful, pungent smell like the interior of a menagerie greeted her nostrils. He was still at the window, and bounded up when he saw her. The grey daylight shone on the top of his head. "He's got his hair cut like a clothes-brush again," she thought. "The fast life he's now leading requires that it should be so. He must look a swell." "Lord in heaven!" he said, crumbling his lighted cigarette between his fingers. "This is a pretty rumpus." "Why--why have you----?" she shrieked incoherently. "Oh, you blackguard! you dishonourable scoundrel!" "Damn it!" he said, looking round him in despair, "I don't see how the gracious baroness is to get out of this without compromising herself." "I don't care! You have broken your word; you have thrown away what was sacred between us--thrown it to a low barmaid ... a barmaid, a person who would hang round the neck of any man who gave her twopence ... You are a miserable wretch, not worth trying to save ... You won't be saved ... You insist on going to the dogs as fast as you can ..."