“My love! my darling!” He knelt beside her and kissed her passionately.  “And to think that for one second I was base enough to doubt you!  My beautiful, innocent darling, slumbering here, like a very child!  No earthly power shall ever sunder you and me!”

A pair of deriding black eyes flashed upon him through the partly open door—­a pair of greedy ears drank in the softly murmured words.  Sybilla Silver, hastening along with the artist’s little note, had caught sight of the baronet entering his wife’s room.  She tapped discreetly at the door, with the twisted note held conspicuously in her hand.

Sir Everard arose and opened it, and Miss Silver’s sudden recoil was the perfection of confusion and surprise.

“I beg your pardon, Sir Everard.  My lady is—­is she not here?”

“Lady Kingsland is asleep.  Do you wish to deliver that note?”

With a second gesture of seeming confusion, Sybilla hid the hand which held it in the folds of her dress.

“Yes—­no—­it doesn’t matter.  It can wait, I dare say.  He didn’t mention being in a hurry.”

“He!  Of whom are you speaking, Sybilla?”

“I—­I chanced to pass through the picture-gallery five minutes ago, Sir Everard, and Mr. Parmalee asked me to do him the favor of handing this note to my lady.”

Sir Everard Kingsland’s face was the face of a man utterly confounded.

“Mr. Parmalee asked you to deliver that note to Lady Kingsland?” he slowly repeated.  “What under heaven can he have to write to my lady about?”

“I really don’t know, Sir Everard,” rejoined Sybilla, “I only know he asked me to deliver it.  He had been looking for my lady’s maid, I fancy, in vain.  It is probably something about his tiresome pictures.  Will you please to take it, Sir Everard, or shall I wait until my lady awakes?”

“You may leave it.”

He spoke the words mechanically, quite stunned by the overwhelming fact that this audacious photographic person dared to write to his wife.  Miss Silver passed him, placed the twisted paper on one of the inlaid tables, and left the room with a triumphant light in her deriding-black eyes.

“I have trumped my first trick,” Sybilla thought, as she walked away, “and I fancy the game will be all my own shortly.  Sir Everard will open and read Mr. Parmalee’s little billet-doux the instant he is alone.”

But just here Sybilla was mistaken.  Sir Everard did not open the tempting twisted note.  He glanced at it once as it lay on the table, but he made no attempt to take it.

“She will show it to me when she awakes,” he said, with compressed lips, “and then I will have this impertinent Yankee kicked from the house.”

He sat beside her, watching her while she slept, with a face quite colorless between conflicting love and torturing doubt.

Nearly an hour passed before Harriet awoke.  The great dark eyes opened in wide surprise at sight of that pale, intense face bending so devotedly over her.