It was easy to slip away alone. Ruth knew that Gloria, who had gone to her own room, expected to be followed, but she did not want to talk alone with Gloria until she had seen Professor Pendragon. She found the enclosed veranda, a sleeping porch above the sun room. She threw a heavy cloak about her shoulders and passed unobserved down the hall and through the narrow doorway leading outside. He was there, waiting for her in his wheel chair. There was another chair beside him, perhaps for the nurse. She could look out over a wide circle of white hills with masses of dark green where fir trees clustered in the hollows. The outer edge of the circle was stained a deep rose, so that hill and cloud lay heaped against the sunset bathed in cold flame. She moved toward him slowly, wondering how she would begin now that she had kept her rendezvous. He laid down the pipe he had been smoking and held out a hand to her, a hand through which the light seemed to shine, it was so pale and thin. She sat down beside him without speaking at once and looked for a moment at the sunset hills. They seemed so quiet and cold and peaceful. What she was going to say would sound strange and unreal here—more strange even than it sounded in New York. “I want to talk to you about Gloria,” she began, but he did not speak when she paused, so she went on: “When you sent me that card to the water colour show—it was at breakfast I got it—Gloria told me that she’d been married to you. She’s my aunt—my father’s sister, but I’d never seen her until after father and mother both died and I came here to study art. Mother sent me to her because she is my only living relative. She didn’t know you were in New York until I got that card, and she asked me not to tell you about her, so I lied when you asked me about myself, or at least didn’t tell the truth. Then just before we came here I saw Nels Zord and he told me you were here too. At first I thought of telling Gloria, but I didn’t because I want you to help me. I want you to save Gloria.” “I’m afraid I can’t save Gloria, my child, any more than Gloria can save me—she perhaps has lost her soul—tomorrow I lose my life. It is all set and we have as little to do with it as with that thin thread of waning moon up there, which tomorrow night will be utterly dark.” “But don’t you see, Gloria doesn’t understand and that’s why she is helpless; but you do understand and can prevent things. You said yourself to me once, ‘The stars incline but do not compel.’ If you won’t help me I must do everything alone, but you must tell me the truth, isn’t George the cause of your illness?” He leaned suddenly toward her. “Why do you think that?”