She watched the tense anger and suspicion die swiftly out of his eyes.  The death of a relative, necessarily postponing Nan’s marriage, appealed to that curious conventional strain in him, inherited from Lady Gertrude.

“Lord St. John dead?” he repeated.  “Nan, why didn’t you tell me?  I should have understood if I’d known that.  I wouldn’t have worried you.”  He was full of shocked contrition and remorse.

Kitty felt she had been disingenuous.  But she had sheltered Nan from the cave-man that dwelt in Roger—­oddly at variance with the streak of conventionality which lodged somewhere in his temperamental make-up.  And she was quite sure that, if Lord St. John knew, he would be glad that his death should have succoured Nan, just as in life he had always sought to serve her.

“I want Nan to come and stay with me for a time,” pursued Kitty steadily, on the principle of striking while the iron is hot.  “Later on I’ll bring her down to Mallow, and later still we can talk about the wedding.  You’ll have to wait some months, Roger.”

He assented, and Nan, realising that it was his mother in him, for the moment uppermost, making these concessions to convention, felt conscious of a wild hysterical desire to burst out laughing.  She made a desperate effort to control herself.

The room seemed to be growing very dark.  Far away in the sky—­no, it must be the ceiling—­she could see the electric lights burning ever more and more dimly as the waves of darkness surged round her, rising higher and higher.

“But there’s honour, dear, and duty. . . .”  Peter’s words floated up to her on the shadowy billows which swayed towards her.

“Honour!  Duty!”

There was a curious singing in her head.  It sounded like the throb of a myriad engines, rhythmically repeating again and again: 

“Honour!  Duty!  Honour!  Duty!”

The words grew fainter, vaguer, trailing off into a regular pulsation that beat against her ears.

“Honour!” She thought she said it very loudly.

But all that Kitty and Roger heard was a little moan as Nan slipped to the ground in a dead faint.

CHAPTER XXVIII

GOOD-BYE!

A chesterfield couch had been pulled well into the bay window of one of Kitty’s big rooms so that Nan, from the nest of cushions amid which she lay, could see all that was passing in the street below.  The warm May sunshine poured into the room, revealing with painful clarity the changes which the last three months had wrought in her.  Never at any time robust in appearance, she seemed the slenderest, frailest thing as she lay there, the delicate angles of her face sharpened by fever and weakness, her cheeks so hollowed that the violet-blue eyes looked almost amazingly big and wide-open in her small face.

Kitty was sitting near her, a half-knitted jumper lying across her knees, the inevitable cigarette in her hand, while Barry, who had returned from Cannes some weeks ago—­entirely unperturbed at finding his new system a complete “wash-out”—­leaned, big and debonair, against the window.