She laughed, and they walked up to the house together, Robin leading his horse. A cheery fire burned on the hearth in the square, old-fashioned hall which Cara had converted into a living-room. As they entered she switched on the lights, revealing panelled walls, thick dim-hued rugs breaking an expanse of polished floor, and, by the fire, big, cushioned easy chairs which seemed to cry aloud for some one to rest weary limbs in their soft, capacious embrace. "Ann's always envious of your electric light," remarked Robin. "Being only cottage folk"--smiling--"we have to content ourselves with lamps, and they seem prone to do appalling things in the way of smoking and covering the whole room with greasy soot the moment you take your eye off them." "I know. They're a frightful nuisance," said Cara, ringing the bell for tea. "But lamp-light is the most becoming form of illumination, you know--especially when you're getting on in years, like me!" Robin helped her off with her coat, lingering a little over the process, and gazed down at her with adoring eyes. "Don't--talk--rubbish!" he said, softly and emphatically. Perhaps he might have gone on to say something more, but at that moment a trim parlourmaid came in and began to arrange the tea-table beside her mistress's chair, and for some time afterwards Cara skilfully contrived to keep the conversation on impersonal lines. It was not until tea was over that Robin suddenly struck a more intimate note again. He had been watching her face in silence for a little while, noticing that it looked very small and pale to-day in its frame of night-dark hair, and that there were faint, purplish shadows beneath her eyes. "You look awfully tired!" he remarked with concern. "And sad," he added. "Is anything bothering you?" She was silent for a moment, staring into the heart of the fire where the red and blue flames played flickeringly over the logs. "I've been taking a look into the past," she said, at last, "It's--it's rather a dreary occupation." "I know," he said quietly. "I know." Ignorant of that earlier past of hers, in which Eliot Coventry had played a part, he was thinking only of her unhappy married life, about which he had gathered a good deal from other people and a little--a very little--from Cara herself. But even that little had let in far more light than she had imagined. Robin's insight was extraordinarily quick and keen, and a phrase dropped here or there, even her very silences at times, had enabled him to make a pretty good conjecture as to the kind of martyrdom she had suffered. It made his blood boil to think of the mental--and even physical--suffering she must have endured, tied to the brute and drunken bully which it was common knowledge Dene Hilyard had been. "Don't you think," he went on gently, "that you could try to forget it, Cara? Don't dwell on the past. Think of the future."