But Mr. Benoliel was none the less to be informed of it that night. He sat late in the hall after the lights had been turned out, with only the firelight flickering on the hearth. He had read the aversion in Cynthia's face which his story had provoked. He had made a sacrifice of her affection. But he had made it for her sake, and he did not regret that he had spoken. None the less he was disturbed. He might have done no good, and he had reopened an old wound of his own. He sat there knowing that if he went to bed he would not sleep; and in a little while he heard a noise in the corridor leading to the billiard-room. The door into the hall was softly opened, and the wavering light of a candle dimly lit up that cavernous place. The screen stood between Benoliel and the intruder. He could see nothing but the light of the candle shaking upon the walls above the screen. He did not move, he heard some one moving across the floor of the hall; he kept his eyes fixed upon the opening between the screens; and he saw Captain Rames pass across the opening. He sprang up with a low cry. Rames was coming from the corridor where his bedroom was to the foot of the stairs up which Cynthia had gone. At the cry Rames stopped, and, holding the candle above his head, peered into the shadows. Mr. Benoliel came quickly toward him. "Where are you going, Captain Rames?" he asked. "To my wife," said Harry. Mr. Benoliel stared at Harry Rames. "You and Cynthia are married?" "Yes." "When are you going to make your marriage public?" "On the day the Whitsunday holidays begin. We shall have it announced in the evening papers. We shall already have left for Fontainebleau." So after all Mr. Benoliel had spoken in vain. He might have spared his breath, and retained in a fuller degree Cynthia's liking and respect. He knew now what she had turned back from the stairs to tell him. "Give her this message," he said. "Tell her to forget what I said to her;" and he moved away. But the message was of no use. He had said what he had to say, and Cynthia could not forget. She watched. She was afraid; as since her seventeenth birthday she had always been afraid. CHAPTER XXIII CYNTHIA ON THE HOUSE On the morning after Parliament had risen the newspapers announced the marriage of Cynthia Daventry to Harry Rames. The ceremony had taken place by special license early one morning at a little church in Mayfair, with a girl friend of Cynthia's, and a member of Parliament named Robert Brook, as witnesses. A good many people were surprised; still more, however, declared that they had foreseen the marriage all along, and that of course it couldn't last; while Lord Helmsdale's mother simply remarked in accents of pity: "Poor thing! Double her age, isn't he? And she was so pretty, too, a few months ago."