The night picture swam before his eyes. He gripped the stones on either side of him. When the mists cleared, he must look again. He looked and saw a white figure, all white even as he had held her to be—all white above the world—was it a minute, was it a lifetime ago? The white figure opened its arms, drew into its embrace the dark visitor. All the whiteness seemed to become lost in the blackness. Black, too, it grew before the eyes of the youthful poet—black the whole world and black his heart! He let himself drop from his perch down into the herb-beds. And there he lay, crushing vervaine and balsam and sweet thyme into aromatic death. There he lay a long, long time. Mistress Margery Nutmeg had tied her goffered nightcap under her decent chin and laid her respectable head upon a chaste pillow with all her usual expectation of that rest which is the reward of an excellent conscience. But (as she afterwards averred) the first strange thing in a night which was to prove one of the strangest at Bindon-Cheveral was that she could not sleep. She felt, she said, as if the Angel of Death was beating his wings about the House; and whenever she closed her eyes she saw rows of little phials before her; and, considering she was so much accustomed to poor dear Master Rickart’s odd ways, it was the most curious thing of all that she could not get the thought of Poison out of her head. At last she could almost have believed she was beginning to doze when there came sounds without her window as of a tapping, a scratching, a scraping, a rustling. She listened; there was no mistake. Out of bed she got. Out of the window she looked! In Lady Lochore’s boudoir, despite the midnight hour, the candles were still burning in goodly array, illuminating round the green board four tired faces, the play of eight hands, the flutter of cards and the flash of dice. Two of these faces showed greedy interest: the wax-like pale-orbed countenance, to wit, of the Dishonourable Caroline and the oriental visage of Villars. But the third, Lady Lochore’s, fever-spotted and haunted, beheld the capricious fortunes of chance ebb or flow with equal indifference. What cared she whether gold grew in a little pile beside her, or whether she had to jot down sums no banker would credit now to the name of Lochore? As little for the game, as little for loss or profit, as small Priscilla herself, whose black-rimmed eyes pleaded for bed, who took no pains to conceal her yawns and played her cards as if she were already in a dream.