A little smile, almost maternal in its tenderness, curved her lips. She had always hoped that Tony's love for her might prove to be only a red-hot boyish infatuation, grounded on propinquity and friendship, which the passage of time would cure, and if, now, man's love was being born in him and she could keep the old friendship, it would give her complete happiness. But she questioned rather anxiously whether Doreen Neville was possessed of a strong enough character to keep him straight. She was so sweet and fragile--the kind of woman to be petted and cossetted and taken care of by some big, kind-hearted man, not in the least the type to steady a headstrong young fool, bent upon blundering on to the rocks. Tony's letter was in the pocket of her coat, and, pulling it out, she ran through it again. There was no further mention of Doreen Neville, but she found that there was a postscript scribbled in a corner, in Tony's most illegible scrawl, which she had overlooked when reading the letter at breakfast time. _"Much as you disapprove, little Puritan Ann, do wish me luck at the tables! Such, luck as we had that night at Montricheux. Do you remember?"_ Ann's heart contracted suddenly. Was she ever likely to forget--to forget that day when, for the first time, Eliot Coventry's grey, compelling eyes had met and held her own? Since then she had touched heights and depths of happiness and despair which had changed her whole outlook on life. Love had come to her--and gone again, and only through sheer pluck and a pride that refused to break had she been able to face the fact and hide her hurt from the world at large. Eliot's sudden disappearance from Silverquay last month had made things a little easier for her. He had left home the day following that of the dinner-party on board the _Sphinx_, and the knowledge that there was no danger of meeting him had helped to lessen the strain, she was enduring. Previously she had been strung up to a high nervous tension by the ever-present fear of running across him unexpectedly, and it had brought her infinite relief when she learned that he had gone away. Since then a strange numbness seemed to have taken possession of her. It was as though some one had closed the door on the past, very quietly and carefully. Dully she recalled the night after Eliot had shown her he had no intention of claiming her love as a succession of interminable hours of mental and physical agony. But now she was hardly conscious of pain--only of a stupefied sense of loss. She felt as if her life were finished, as though all the days and years that lay ahead of her were entirely empty and purposeless. Sometime or other, she supposed, she would come alive again, be able to feel and realise things once more. But she dreaded the coming of that time. Better this apathy, like the stupor of one drugged, than a repetition of the anguish she had already suffered.