She passed it over with a smile. Alexis rose to his feet, tore the envelope open, and moving a few yards away towards the surf read the message. Then slowly he tore it up into the tiniest fragments and scattered them on the last wavelets of the ebb tide, and stood for a second or two, staring across the sea. At last he turned. Olivia rose to meet him. Myra was impassively making her way back up the rough slope. “What’s the matter?” asked Olivia, puzzled at his scrupulous destruction of the telegram and reading something like fear in his eyes. “I’ve had bad news,” he said. He picked up his bath-gown, shook it free from sand, and huddled it around him. “Let us get up to the house.” He shivered. “It’s cold.” She followed him wonderingly. “What bad news?” she asked. He turned his head, with a half-laugh. “Nothing so very desperate. The end of the world hasn’t come yet. I’ll tell you when I’ve changed.” He rushed up the steps of the veranda and into his little dressing-room. Olivia, dry and warm, sat in a sun-beat chair and anxiously waited for him. The instinct of a loving woman, the delicacy of a sensitive soul, forbade her teasing with insistent questions a man thrown for the moment off his balance. Yet she swept the horizon of her mind for reasons. A quarter of an hour afterwards—it had seemed a quarter of a century—he appeared, dressed, not in his customary flannels, but in the blue serge suit of their wedding day. The sight of it struck a chill through her heart. “You are going away?” He nodded. “Yes, my dear, I have to.” “Why? What has happened?” “I can’t tell you, dear. That’s the heart-rending part of it. It’s secret—from the Foreign Office.” She reacted in laughter. “Oh, my darling—how you frightened me. I thought it was something serious.” “Of course it’s serious, if I have to leave you for three or four days—perhaps a week.” “A week!” She stood aghast. It was serious. How could she face a lonely epoch of seven days, each counting twenty-four thousand halting hours? What did it mean? “There are not many men who know Russian as I do. I’ve been in touch with the Intelligence Department ever since I landed in England. That’s why I went to Finland in the autumn. These things bind me to inviolable secrecy, beloved. You understand, don’t you?” “Of course I understand,” she replied proudly. “I could refuse—if you made a point of it. I’m a free man.” She put her two hands on his shoulders—and ever after he had this one more unforgettable picture of her—the red bathing cap knotted in front, dainty, setting off her dark eyes and her little eager face—the peignoir, carelessly loose, revealing the sweet, frank mould of her figure in the red bathing suit. “My father and my two brothers gave their lives for England. Do you think I could be so utterly selfish as to grudge my country a week of my husband’s society?” He took her cheeks in his hands. “More and more do you surpass the Princess of my dreams.”