She slipped into her own room, and locked the door.  He shook his head, and went slowly downstairs.  He found Peter pacing the hall, and they went out into the June dark together, a discomfited pair.

Meanwhile Mrs. Friend waited for Helena.  She heard voices in the passage and the locking of Helena’s door.  She was still weak from her illness, so it seemed wisest to get into bed.  But she had no hope or intention of sleep.  She sat up in bed, with a shawl round her, certain that Helena would come.  She was in a ferment of pity and fear,—­she scarcely knew why—­fear for the young creature she had come to love with all her heart; and she strained her ears to catch the sound of an opening door.

But Helena did not come.  Through her open window Lucy could hear steps along the terrace coming and going—­to and fro.  Then they ceased; all sounds in the house ceased.  The church clock in the distance struck midnight, and a little owl close to the house shrieked and wailed like a human thing, to the torment of Lucy’s nerves.  A little later she was aware of Buntingford coming upstairs, and going to his room on the further side of the gallery.

Then, nothing.  Deep silence—­that seemed to flow through the house and all its rooms and passages like a submerging flood.

Except!—­What was that sound, in the room next to hers—­in Helena’s room?

Lucy Friend got up trembling, put on a dressing-gown, and laid an ear to the wall between her and Helena.  It was a thin wall, mostly indeed a panelled partition, belonging to an old bit of the house, in which the building was curiously uneven in quality—­sometimes inexplicably strong, and sometimes mere lath and plaster, as though the persons, building or re-building, had come to an end of their money and were scamping their work.

Lucy, from the other side of the panels, had often heard Helena singing while she dressed, or chattering to the housemaid.  She listened now in an anguish, her mind haunted alternately by the recollection of the scene in the drawing-room, and the story told by Geoffrey French, and by her rising dread and misgiving as to Helena’s personal stake in it.  She had observed much during the preceding weeks.  But her natural timidity and hesitancy had forbidden her so far to draw hasty deductions.  And now—­perforce!—­she drew them.

The sounds in the next room seemed to communicate their rhythm of pain to Lucy’s own heart.  She could not bear it after a while.  She noiselessly opened her own door, and went to Helena’s.  To her scarcely audible knock there was no answer.  After an interval she knocked again—­a pause.  Then there were movements inside, and Helena’s muffled voice through the door.

“Please, Lucy, go to sleep!  I am all right.”

“I can’t sleep.  Won’t you let me in?”

Helena seemed to consider.  But after an interval which seemed interminable to Lucy Friend, the key was slowly turned and the door yielded.