Over the country about Henley, that same day, the sun was shining gloriously.

It was about five o’clock in the afternoon, and there was a clearness about the light, a distinctness about the shadows, which, taken in conjunction with the heavy bank of clouds into which the sun would presently sink, argued coming rain. For the present, however, nature was lovely to look at; and a garden-party which was going on in the large, old-fashioned garden of a large, old-fashioned country house, about a mile from the river, had the benefit of every advantage which atmosphere and surroundings could give.

It was a large party, and the scene was very bright and animated. On the larger of the two lawns, conspicuous among the well-dressed but by no means striking-looking women about her, stood Mrs. Romayne, talking to a local magnate.

She had arrived about half an hour before, and the politely concealed satisfaction and surprise with which she had been received had testified to the fact that her appearance at such a function was a phenomenon in the neighbourhood. Invitations had showered in on her during her residence at the “cottage,” but it had gradually become an established fact that she was “going out very little.” This was in truth the first party she had attended. It was fortunate that her hostess was not a particularly observant person. There had been something about Mrs. Romayne when she arrived which might have dashed that hostess’s personal elation with a suspicion that her guest’s appearance had been dictated by motives not wholly complimentary to the party; lines about the mouth which suggested the enforced endurance of a burden from which she was seeking temporary relief, however fictitious; a restlessness in the eyes which suggested an attempt at the eluding of the too insistent companionship of her own thoughts.

Her eyes were painfully bright, and there was a nervous tension about her manner as she stood there on the lawn, talking and laughing. But her companion of the moment—a worthy old gentleman, with not much acquaintance among women of the world—thought her simply the most astonishingly charming woman he had ever met; and seeking in his mind for lines on which to make himself agreeable to her, he recollected to have heard something about her son.

“You have a son here, I believe?” he said, with ponderous interest. “I should greatly like to make his acquaintance.”

Mrs. Romayne laughed.

“I have a son,” she said, “but he is not here, I’m sorry to say. He is hard at work just at present. Ah!” she broke off with an exclamation of surprise. “I see a friend of mine over there! I must go and speak to her.” And with a bow and a smile to her admirer, she broke off the conversation which had, perhaps, seemed longer to one party than to the other, and moved across the lawn to where Hilda Compton was standing watching her with an uncertain but not particularly pleasant expression on her pretty face.

“Are you staying in the neighbourhood?” said Mrs. Romayne prettily, when they had shaken hands. She was apparently entirely oblivious of something cold and disagreeable in the younger woman’s manner. “Is your husband here?”

Hilda Compton glanced at her with a certain tentative triumph in her eyes.

“No!” she said. “He’s not here. I’m staying on a house-boat, but he is kept in town over some troublesome business!”

She paused, and then, as Mrs. Romayne made a rather patronising gesture of sympathy, that gleam of triumph strengthened into something distinctly malicious. Hilda Compton had never forgotten or forgiven that moment in the Norfolk garden twelve months ago. It had been no part of her policy to resent it when such resentment must necessarily have rebounded to her own disadvantage; she had accepted Mrs. Romayne’s society friendliness during the past season with just such a manner as might sting but could not, in very self-respect, be impugned by the elder woman; a manner cleverly tinged with that deference which points the sense of superiority with which a certain type of girl recognises the fact that the present is to her, and not to the previous generation. But she had hoped always that the day might come when she would find herself in a position to take more active measures, and she felt, now, that even what she knew to be a slight breach of conjugal faith would be venial, if it would straighten what she would have called her “score” against Julian Romayne’s mother.

“Yes, it’s rather a bore!” she said. “City business, you know! Don’t you think it’s very foolish of men to speculate, Mrs. Romayne? Of course I haven’t a quarter of your experience, but I think so. They always seem to get into trouble of some sort! But you know more than I do about this affair, no doubt, since Mr. Romayne is mixed up in it, and he’s such a devoted son. Husbands don’t tell one much, I find!”

Self-command is a wonderful thing, even when it originates in no higher motive than the instinct of a woman of the world for the retention of her society demeanour. Mrs. Romayne’s lips were ashen and her fingers were clenched round the sunshade she held until her rings cut into them, but she faced Hilda Compton steadily, and with a mechanical smile, her eyes, a little dull and contracted, meeting the girl’s pretty, unfeeling ones. Hilda Compton noticed the change of colour even behind the artificial tinting, and rejoiced at the slip of the tongue by which her foolish young husband had put such a weapon into her hand. If only she had succeeded in making Howard tell her more, instead of making him lose his temper! She reflected, however, that perhaps the truth was not so very bad after all, and hints might possibly sound worse than the actual facts.

“Do tell Mr. Romayne, from me, that I hope he hasn’t done anything very shocking!” she said, with a laugh. “I wanted Howard to tell me just what it was, but he would not. Isn’t it funny how men seem to lose their heads altogether when they get on to that silly Stock Exchange? The last men one would expect, too! Who would have thought of Mr. Romayne’s getting into trouble of that kind?”

Somewhat to her disgust, Hilda Compton found as she proceeded that it was impossible to give such significance to her words as she would have wished. She realised that it would never do to allow herself to be brought to book, and consequently conventionality demanded that she should adopt a jesting tone, and trust to Mrs. Romayne’s possessing some half knowledge which should give the words the barb she wished for them. She had a pleasant conviction, as Mrs. Romayne answered her, that she had done something, at least, towards wiping out that old score. The elder woman’s words were preceded by a harsh little laugh, and there was something indistinct about their utterance.

“Just so. Who would have thought——”

Mrs. Romayne stopped abruptly, and a sharp, extraordinary spasm passed across her face, leaving it fixed and old.

The girl by her side could not flatter herself that the effect was produced by her words, for Mrs. Romayne was gazing to the other side of the garden, and it was evidently something she had seen there which had affected her so powerfully. Turning her own curious eyes in the same direction, Hilda Compton saw nothing calculated to account for such an effect. The crowd had drifted away to some extent to the other lawn, and the tennis-courts, and there was a considerable space, sparsely sprinkled with people, between where they stood and the last group on the lawn; a group of ladies to whom the host was introducing a little alert, elderly man with grey hair; a little man who looked to-day—though only one pair of the two pair of women’s eyes fixed upon him across the lawn recognised this—exactly as he had looked twenty years ago.

Hilda Compton did not know him, and she was wondering curiously whether Mrs. Romayne did, when she heard their hostess’s voice and turned quickly. Mrs. Romayne, roused apparently by finding herself addressed, had turned also—very quickly it seemed to Hilda Compton, and rather as though she did not wish her face to be seen by some one on the other side of the garden—and was listening with a dazed, strained expression of enforced attention.

“I want to introduce a connexion of mine, my dear Mrs. Romayne. Something of a traveller, and something of an eccentricity; but, really, worth talking to. There he is!” indicating the little alert, elderly man on the other side of the lawn. “He is a Dr. Aston. May I fetch him?”

To Hilda Compton’s astonishment Mrs. Romayne stretched out her hand hurriedly in unmistakeable dissent, and it was shaking like a leaf.

“I’m afraid I must say ‘no,’” she said, in a hoarse, hurried tone which sounded as though she could hardly control it. “I have a long drive, you know, and I must run away.”

She took her leave so briefly and hurriedly that her hostess came to the conclusion that illness must be the cause of the seclusion in which she was living, and that she must have miscalculated her strength that afternoon.

She might have thought so with even more reason if she had seen the strange collapse of her whole figure with which Mrs. Romayne sank back into the corner of her carriage as she was driven home along the country roads. If her attendance at the garden-party had been indeed a desperate attempt at finding some sort of temporary oblivion or distraction, that attempt had obviously failed. Her face was drawn and set, and in her eyes, as they stared unseeingly before her, there was a look as of a woman who is quivering still under the influence of some horrible shock.

She had, as she had said, a long drive home, and as she neared her own house that look in her eyes faded, displaced by a sick hunger of anxiety. She got out of the carriage quickly, helping herself a good deal as she rose, however, as if that shock had affected her physical strength.

“Has Mr. Julian come?” she said to the servant who opened the door; then as the woman answered in the negative, she moved swiftly on to where her letters lay waiting for her, and looked them rapidly over. There was none from Julian, and she carried them listlessly upstairs as she went to dress for her solitary dinner.

The rain, which was falling fast by this time in London, was just beginning to patter slowly on the window when she came into the dining-room; and the wind was rising and moving gustily round the house. They were dreary sounds, both of them, and Mrs. Romayne shivered a little as she sat down. Apparently the monotonous pattering, growing quicker and quicker as dinner went on, or the low howling of the wind, made her nervous. She ate nothing, and when at last, the form of dinner having been gone through with, and the servant having left the room, she rose and walked aimlessly to the fireplace, her lips were strangely compressed, and she seemed to control the expression of her eyes with a determined effort. It was as though she were controlling something within of which the tendency frightened her. She stood there forgetting, apparently, to go into the drawing-room, her face fixed and intent as though she were reasoning or arguing with herself. At last she shivered sharply and her lips twitched. Then rousing herself forcibly, as it seemed, she rang the bell fiercely, and gave orders that a fire should be lighted in the drawing-room. It was a wretched evening, she said to the servant, as though the audible expression of a tangible reason for the nervous discomfort which seemed to be upon her was some sort of relief to her. The fire lighted, she drew a chair in front of it, and taking up a novel, set herself to read with a desperate determination in every line of her face.

Down one page, line by line, on through the next, still line by line, her eyes travelled steadily, mechanically; and then, as mechanically, her hand moved, turned the leaf, and her eyes moved on again. But unless her face greatly belied her, the sense of the words she read so intently never penetrated to her brain. By-and-by that movement of her eyes ceased; she sat staring fixedly at the page before her; then she let the hand that held the book sink gradually on her knee, and sat staring into space as she had sat staring at the printed words. Her face was drawn, and there was an intense, indefinite dread about it which was none the less ghastly in that it would have been impossible to say in which of her set features its shadow lurked.

The room was absolutely still. Outside the rain fell and the wind moaned. Inside the intense quiet seemed to be taking a weirdly tangible form, and to be creeping closer and closer round her motionless figure with every breath she drew.

With a sudden, sharp movement, as though, in taking a too sharply piercing point, her thoughts had roused her to a desperate resistance of them, she rose, and began to walk restlessly up and down the room.

Her brows were drawn to a concentration which made her whole face look thin and very old. There was an expression of deliberate, self-conscious self-contempt about her mouth, but in her eyes there lurked the battling horror against which all her force seemed to be fiercely arrayed. Up and down she walked, no muscle of her set face relaxing; until, quite suddenly, there swept across it, breaking up all its rigid lines, a very agony of yearning. It was as though some sudden and most inopportune realisation, in no wise to be resisted, had shaken her through and through.

“If only I had dared to ask him! If only, if only I dared to speak!”

The words had broken from her half aloud, a sharp, low cry, and as she uttered them she stopped in her walk, gripping and clinging to a chair as if for physical support in a moment of terrible mental conflict. She was evidently fighting desperately inch by inch for the self-control which was slipping from her; the self-control which she dreaded to lose as she dreaded nothing else in life; the self-control to which she clung with the tenacity of instinctive self-preservation.

She lifted her face at last, still and hard as resolution could make it. She crossed the room with quick, resolute steps, looking neither to the right nor the left, and went rapidly upstairs to her own room. A desk containing a quantity of papers stood on the chest of drawers. They were old bills and receipts that needed sorting and destroying, and she had brought them into the country saying that she never had time for such work in town. She went up to this desk now, lifted it in her two hands, and placing it on the table, sat down before it and unlocked it. All her movements were the quick, concentrated movements of a woman to whom employment, close, tedious employment, has become an absolute necessity.

A telegram ten days old was not among the papers to be sorted, but Mrs. Romayne held one in her hand as she sat there at her writing-table. She had drawn it from the front of her dress and she read and re-read it, oblivious of the task she had set herself, with an intensity in her eyes which seemed as though it would wring a hidden meaning from the words. It was the telegram Julian had sent her ten days before. She folded it at last with a quick defiant gesture and drew towards her a packet of receipts.

She untied the string that fastened the papers, and out from among them there fell a folded letter, yellow with age, and crumpled. It had evidently worked its way into that packet by accident, as papers will when many are kept together, for it was obviously a letter and not a bill. Mrs. Romayne stretched out her hand mechanically and picked it up and opened it. Her eyes were met by the words, written in a childish, scrawling, much blotted handwriting: “My dear mamma.”

It was the letter which she had received from Julian twenty years ago at Nice.

In an instant, even as her eyes fell on those faded baby characters, so suddenly and so utterly that she never realised her loss, the self-control to which she had clung so fiercely melted away from Mrs. Romayne. Before the flash and quiver of recognition had subsided on her face she had seized the bell-rope and was ringing furiously for her maid. The woman, appearing breathless and alarmed a moment later, found her mistress searching feverishly for bonnet and cloak.

“I am going to London, Dawson. Order the carriage at once.”

The voice was harsh, rapid, and peremptory; but the bewildered woman hesitated.

“Now, ma’am?”

Mrs. Romayne turned on her with such a face as her maid had never seen before.

“At once, I said. At once!”

The last train was just steaming into the station when Mrs. Romayne’s carriage dashed up, the horse smoking and covered with foam.

She had thrust that yellow little letter half-unconsciously into her pocket, and all through the journey she sat motionless, clasping it tightly in her hand, her eyes wild, her features forced into a quiescence which sat upon them like a mask.

That mask seemed to get thin, to break away now and again, as she drove through the London streets at last, as though the wild emotion which it hid was growing too strong for it. Her breath was coming faster and faster, until her white, parted lips took an involuntary line of physical pain.

There were no lights in the house in Chelsea as her cab drew up. It was twelve o’clock. She rang violently, and waited, her rapid breathing almost suffocating her. No one came. She rang again, pausing this time with her hand on the bell; again and again, furiously, as a wild, unreasoning horror seemed to seize upon her and tear at her heart. At last there was a sound as of the tentative undoing of bolts and turning of keys. The door was opened an inch or two, and a frightened woman’s voice said:

“Who is it?”

A moment later there was no possibility of doubt on that score. The door was hurriedly thrown open, and Mrs. Romayne moved swiftly into the hall, turning fiercely to confront the astonished, partially-dressed servant, whose bedroom candle seemed to be the only light in the house.

“Has Mr. Julian gone to bed?” she demanded, and the woman hardly recognised her mistress’s voice.

“Mr. Julian is not here, ma’am!” she answered. “He has not been here since the day before yesterday.”