“Ever since I was a kid I have had a hard time. I have gone to all lengths in time of stress. I have been in all parts of the globe after adventures, but this is the saddest adventure of them all. My heart stopped when I saw that look on your face.” He stood straight as an arrow, fine as a lance; his figure once more was immovable against the curtain, and he looked like the picture up in her room, but the smile was gone. “My things are all in the station. Before your clock strikes again I shall be gone. Think of me as you will, but you can’t believe that I did not love you. _That you can’t believe!_” She would have given much to think him innocent. She covered her face with her hands, murmuring: “_Oh_--you better just go--you better just go.” He looked around the dark, paneled room where the shadows gathered like ghosts ready, when he should go, to haunt Waybrook; and as she stood with her hands across her eyes, he took her in his arms and kissed her upon her hair, upon the hand covering her eyes, and upon her lips. He opened the window and she heard him say, “Good-by! Good-by!” and only stirred when she felt the cold night air rushing in upon her. * * * * * She found herself clinging to the curtain, her face buried in its folds. She might have been a night moth blown there as she clung and shook, the heavy curtain wrapping her round. Ramsay had drawn her toward the window as if he wanted to take her with him into a world which had treated him not any too well! She came to herself as the clock struck, realizing that she was part of a household whose conventions would not stand for the lady of the house wandering about at dawn through the lower rooms without excuse! She passed her hands over her face to wipe away not the kisses of an hour before, but the marks of tears; and drew the curtains to shut out with the moonlight the figure of the man who had disappeared into the night. Then she left the music room, intending to go upstairs. She remembered what Cynthia Moore had said that morning about the Earl of Moray and the line of the Persian proverb: “Honor and Dishonor are in the hands of the Beloved.” On the first step of the staircase she stopped to look toward the smoking room at the far end of the hall, and she saw a line of light under the doorway. Her first thought was that Ramsay had hidden there, and as she crossed the hall she realized that she wanted him to be there--_she wanted him to be there!_ In one of the entirely comfortable chairs, his hand shading his eyes, an open book on his knee, unconscious of midnight rendezvous, her husband was sitting. He turned round and rose as his wife came in, and she saw, although grave and stern, he was impersonal as far as _she_ was concerned. “Hello, Nell! Couldn’t sleep, just as I couldn’t, I suppose?” She wondered if it was possible that he had heard her in the music room at the end of the hall. She came over to him.