‘Oh, in that way I hope I should be all right. It is flame and smoke and burning that I cannot face. All my life I have had the fear. I suppose everyone has a secret horror in their lives. Fire is mine. I have suffered from it always. You don’t know what it is. It is something far worse than fear. I am not really afraid of the fire. I knew how ridiculously harmless that little burning shade would be, but it was the fire, the flame that made me--well, made me almost sick with a shrinking--a sort of supernatural repulsion that I cannot explain.’ ‘How very unfortunate!’ answered Gundred, deliberately cool and incredulous in tone. ‘It must be so very inconvenient--yes? People are sadly apt to misunderstand, don’t you find?’ The young man, however, was a worm only in his tendency to turn. He flushed, seeing clearly the hard malice of her mood. ‘Very few, thank Heaven,’ he answered, ‘have ever had the opportunity of misunderstanding. You have been especially unlucky, and so have I.’ ‘Oh, don’t mention it,’ replied Gundred, politely demurring. ‘I must, obviously,’ he went on. ‘You see, one bears one’s secret horror, whatever it may be, quite alone, telling nobody about it. But sometimes, once or twice in one’s life, some cursed accident drags it to the surface, and the horror becomes too bad to bear, and an outsider gets a glimpse of it. I have been unfortunate in the moment of my accident, and in the person who saw it, and there is no more to be said: that is all.’ The young man, the coward, the unmentionable, seemed actually to be snubbing the brave, the serene, the faultless Lady Gundred Darnley. This must instantly be put a stop to. ‘One does not like to believe that any man can have a fear too bad to bear--no?’ inquired Gundred, very gently and softly, as if asking for the sake of information. The victim had clearly had enough of this persecution. ‘After all,’ he said, ‘when one comes to think of it, I suppose you are yourself more or less responsible for my fears, if anyone is.’ Gundred gave him a blank blue stare. ‘I?’ she questioned in amazement, as if the very suggestion were an insolent piece of irreverence. The young man was not abashed, however, and proceeded to make his position good. ‘You had a ghastly fire at Brakelond many years ago,’ he answered. ‘Somebody was burnt--a cousin of yours, I think. Well, that fire was a great shock to my mother, and upset her dreadfully. I was the result, and I am the incarnation of her terrors.’ Gundred hesitated in her enmity, and her manner changed. ‘I beg your pardon,’ she said; ‘but I did not quite catch your name before dinner. But from what you have just said, are you--surely you must be----’