He was silent.

“Louis!  Answer me!”

“All—­of it,” he managed to reply.

[Illustration:  “She knelt down beside the bed and ... said whatever prayer she had in mind”]

“All!”

“Yes.”

“Then—­perhaps you scarcely expected me to call up to-night.  Did you?”

“No.”

“Suppose I had not done so.”

He shivered slightly, but remained mute.

“Answer me, Louis?”

“It would have been—­better.”

“For you?”

“For—­both.”

“Do you believe it?”

“Yes.”

“Then—­have I any choice except to say—­good-night?”

“No choice.  Good-night.”

“Good-night.”

He crept, shaking, into his bed-room, sat down, resting his hands on his knees and staring at vacancy.

Valerie, in her room, hung up the receiver, buried her face in her hands for a moment, then quietly turned, lowering her hands from her face, and looked down at the delicate, intimate garments spread in order on the counterpane beside her.  There was a new summer gown there, too—­a light, dainty, fragile affair on which she had worked while away.  Beside it lay a big summer hat of white straw and white lilacs.

She stood for a moment, reflecting; then she knelt down beside the bed and covered her eyes again while she said whatever prayer she had in mind.

It was not a very short petition, because it concerned Neville.  She asked nothing for herself except as it regarded him or might matter to his peace of mind.  Otherwise what she said, asked, and offered, related wholly to Neville.

Presently she rose and went lightly and silently about her ablutions; and afterward she dressed herself in the fragile snowy garments ranged so methodically upon the white counterpane, each in its proper place.

She was longer over her hair, letting it fall in a dark lustrous cloud to her waist, then combing and gathering it and bringing it under discipline.

She put on her gown, managing somehow to fasten it, her lithe young body and slender arms aiding her to achieve the impossible between neck and shoulders.  Afterward she pinned on her big white hat.

At the door she paused for a second; took a last look at the quiet, white little room tranquil and silent in the lamplight; then she turned off the light and went out, softly, holding in her hands a key which fitted no door of her own.

One o’clock sounded heavily from Saint Hilda’s as she left her house; the half hour was striking as she stooped in the dark hallway outside the studio and fitted the key she held—­the key that was to unlock for her the mystery of the world.

He had not heard her.  She groped her way into the unlighted studio, touched with caressing finger-tips the vague familiar shapes that the starlight, falling through the glass above, revealed to her as she passed.