The door opened softly. A long beam of late winter sunshine which had been pouring in at the opposite window and striking the door with its projection of golden powder suddenly framed, played over, and lighted up the figure of Lady Llwellyn. Sir Robert stood in the middle of the pleasant room and looked at her. The sunlight showed up the grey pallor of her face, the lines of sorrow and resignation, the faded hair, the thin and bony hands. "Kate," he said in a weak voice. It was the first time he had called her by her name for many years. The tired face lit up with a swift and divine tenderness. She made a step forward into the room. He was swaying a little, giddy, it seemed. She looked him full in the face and saw things there which she had never seen before. A great horror was upon him, a frightful awakening from the long, sensual sloth of his life. Moving, working, in that great countenance, generally so impassive, uninfluenced by any emotion--at least to her long watchings--except by a moody irritation, she saw Doom, Fate, the Call of the Eumenides. It came to the poor woman in a sudden wave of illuminating certainty. She _knew_ the end had come. And yet, strangely enough, she felt nothing but a quickening of the pulses, a swift embracing pity which was almost a joy in its breaking away of barriers. If the end were here, it should be together--at last together. For she loved this cruel, sinning man, this lover of light loves, this man of purple, fine linen, and the sparkling deadly wines of life. "Kate!" He said it once more. Her manner changed. Shrinking, timidity, fear, fled for ever. In her overpowering rush of protecting love all the diffidences of temperament, all the bars which he had forced her to build around her instincts, were swept utterly away. She went quickly up to him, folded him in her arms. "Robert!" she said, "poor boy, the end has come to it all. I knew it must come some day. Well, we have not been happy. I wonder if _you_ have been happy? No, I don't think so. But now, Robert, you have me to comfort you with my love once more, my poor Robert, once more, as in the old, simple days when we were young." She led him to a couch. He trembled violently. His decision of movement seemed to have gone. His purpose of flight had for the moment become obscure. And now, into this man's heart came a remorse and regret so awful, a realisation so sudden and strong, so instinct with a pain for which there is no name, that everything before his eyes turned to burning fire. The flames of his agony burnt up the veils which had for so long obscured the truth. They shrivelled and vanished. Too late, too late, he knew what he had lost. The last agony wrenched his brain round again to another and more terrible contemplation. His thoughts were in other and outside hands, which pulled his brain from one scene to another as a man moves the eye of the camera obscura to different fields of view.