“You shall tell me how these months have gone with you while we dine,” said he.  “Your letters told me nothing of your troubles.”

“I did not mean them to,” replied Sylvia.

“I guessed that, my dear.  It was like you.  Yet I would rather have known.”

Only a few hours before he had stood upon the deck of the Channel packet and had seen the bows swing westward of Dover Castle and head toward the pier.  Would Sylvia be there, he had wondered, as he watched the cluster of atoms on the quay, and in a little while he had seen her, standing quite alone, at the very end of the breakwater that she might catch the first glimpse of her lover.  Others had traveled with them in the carriage to London and there had been no opportunity of speech.  All that he knew was that she had been alone now for some weeks in the little house in Hobart Place.

“One thing I see,” he said.  “You are not as troubled as you were.  The look of fear—­that has gone from your eyes.  Sylvia, I am glad!”

“There, were times,” she answered—­and as she thought upon them, terror once more leapt into her face—­“times when I feared more than ever, when I needed you very much.  But they are past now, Hilary,” and her hand dropped for a moment upon his, and her eyes brightened with a smile.  As they dined she told the story of those months.

“We returned to London very suddenly after you had gone away,” she began.  “We were to have stayed through September.  But my father said that business called him back, and I noticed that he was deeply troubled.”

“When did you notice that?” asked Chayne, quickly.  “When did you first notice it?”

Sylvia reflected for a moment.

“The day after you had gone.”

“Are you sure?” asked Chayne, with a certain intensity.

“Quite.”

Chayne nodded his head.

“I did not understand the reason of the hurry.  And I was perplexed—­and also a little alarmed.  Everything which I did not understand frightened me in those days.”  She spoke as if “those days” and all their dark events belonged to some dim period of which no consequence could reach her now.  “Our departure had almost the look of a flight.”

“Yes,” said Chayne.  For his part he was not surprised at their flight.  He had passed more than one wakeful night during the last few months arguing and arguing again whether or no he should have disclosed to Sylvia the meaning of that softly opening door and the shadow on the ceiling as he read it.  He might have been wrong; if so, he would have added to Sylvia’s burden of troubles yet another, and one more terrible than all the rest.  He might have been right; and if so, he might have enabled Sylvia to avert a tragedy.  Thus the argument had revolved in a circle and left him always in the same doubt.  Now he understood that his explanation of the incident had been confirmed.  The loud whistle from the darkness of the road, the yokel’s cry, which had driven Garratt Skinner from the room, as noiselessly as he had entered it, had done more than that—­they had driven him from the neighborhood altogether.  Some one had seen him—­had seen him standing just behind Walter Hine in the lighted room—­and on the next day he had fled!