He stooped and pressed his lips to her hair, holding her in his arms.

“My dear!” he murmured.  “My very dear!”

And so they remained for a little space.

Presently she lifted her face, white and strained, to his.

“Must you go, Peter?”

“Heart’s beloved, there is no other way.  We may not love . . . and we can’t be together and not love. . . .  So I must go.”

She lay very still in his arms for a moment.  Then he felt a long, shuddering sigh run through her body.

“Yes,” she whispered.  “Yes. . . .  Peter, go very quickly. . . .”

He took her face between his hands and kissed her on the mouth—­not passionately, but with the ineffably sad calmness of farewell.

“God keep you, dear,” he said.

The door closed behind him, shutting him from her sight, and she stood for a few moments staring dazedly at its wooden panels.  Then, with a sudden desperate impulse, she tore it open again and peered out.

But there was only silence—­silence and emptiness.  He had gone.

CHAPTER XXVII

THE DARK ANGEL

The following morning Ralph and Penelope breakfasted alone, the latter having given orders that Nan was on no account to be disturbed.  It was rather a dreary meal.  They were each oppressed by the knowledge which last night had revealed to them—­the knowledge of the tragedy of love into which their two friends had been thrust by circumstances.

On their return from the concert at the Albert Hall they had encountered Mallory in the vestibule of the Mansions, and the naked misery stamped upon his face had arrested them at once.

“Peter, what is it?”

The question had sped involuntarily from Penelope’s lips as she met his blank, unseeing gaze.  The sound of her voice seemed to bring him back to recognition.

“Go to Nan!” he said in queer, clipped tones.  “She’ll need you.  Go at once!”

And from a Nan whose high courage had at last bent beneath the storm, leaving her spent and unresisting, Penelope had learned the whole unhappy truth.

Since breakfast the Fentons had been dejectedly discussing the matter together.

“Why doesn’t she break off this miserable engagement with Trenby?” asked Ralph moodily.

“She won’t.  I think she would have done if—­if—­for Peter’s sake.  But not otherwise.  She’s got some sort of fixed notion that it wouldn’t be playing fair.”  Penelope paused, then added wretchedly:  “I feel as if our happiness had been bought at her expense!”

“Ours?” Completely mystified, Ralph looked across at her inquiringly.

“Yes, ours.”  And she proceeded to fill in the gaps, explaining how, when she had refused to marry him, down at Mallow the previous summer, it was Nan who had brought about his recall from London.