There came a knock at the door.  Nurse Baker did not move her head, but continued watching her patient, with hands ready to act.

“Come in,” she said, not looking round.

Lady Ashbridge’s face was towards the door.  As Sir James entered, she suddenly sprang up, and in her right hand that lay beside her was a knife, which she had no doubt taken from the tea-table when she came upstairs.  She turned swiftly towards Michael, and stabbed at him with it.

“It’s a trap,” she cried.  “You’ve led me into a trap.  They are going to take me away.”

Michael had thrown up his arm to shield his head.  The blow fell between shoulder and elbow, and he felt the edge of the knife grate on his bone.

And from deep in his heart sprang the leaping fountains of compassion and love and yearning pity.

CHAPTER XII

Michael was sitting in the big studio at the Falbes’ house late one afternoon at the end of June, and the warmth and murmur of the full-blown summer filled the air.  The day had so far declined that the rays of the sun, level in its setting, poured slantingly in through the big window to the north, and shining through the foliage of the plane-trees outside made a diaper of rosy illuminated spots and angled shadows on the whitewashed wall.  As the leaves stirred in the evening breeze, this pattern shifted and twinkled; now, as the wind blew aside a bunch of foliage, a lake of rosy gold would spring up on the wall; then, as the breath of movement died, the green shadows grew thicker again faintly stirring.  Through the window to the south, which Hermann had caused to be cut there, since the studio was not used for painting purposes, Michael could see into the patch of high-walled garden, where Mrs. Falbe was sitting in a low basket chair, completely absorbed in a book of high-born and ludicrous adventures.  She had made a mild attempt when she found that Michael intended to wait for Sylvia’s return to entertain him till she came; but, with a little oblique encouragement, remarking on the beauty and warmth of the evening, and the pleasure of sitting out of doors, Michael had induced her to go out again, and leave him alone in the studio, free to live over again that which, twenty-four hours ago, had changed life for him.

He reconstructed it as he sat on the sofa and dwelt on the pearl-moments of it.  Just this time yesterday he had come in and found Sylvia alone.  She had got up, he remembered, to give him greeting, and just opposite the fireplace they had come face to face.  She held in her hand a small white rose which she had plucked in the tiny garden here in the middle of London.  It was not a very fine specimen, but it was a rose, and she had said in answer to his depreciatory glance:  “But you must see it when I have washed it.  One has to wash London flowers.”