In the fading light he bent low over the pages.  Later a servant lighted the lamps; later still Portlaw went into the library, drew out a book bound in crushed levant, pushed an electric button, and sat down.  The book bound so admirably in crushed levant was a cook-book; the bell he rang summoned his cook.

In the lamplit living-room the younger man bent over the letter that had come at last.  It was dated early in April; had been written at Palm Beach, carried to New York, but had only been consigned to the mails within thirty-six hours: 

   “I have had all your letters—­but no courage to answer.  Now you
   will write no more.

   “Dear—­this, my first letter to you, is also my last.  I know now
   what the condemned feel who write in the hour of death.

“When you went away on Thursday I could not leave my room to say good-bye to you.  Gray came and knocked, but I was not fit to be seen.  If I hadn’t looked so dreadfully I wouldn’t have minded being ill.  You know that a little illness would not have kept me from coming to say good-bye to you.

“So you went away, all alone with Gray.  I remained in bed that day with the room darkened.  Mother and Cecile were troubled but could not bring themselves to believe that my collapse was due to your going.  It was not logical, you know, as we all expected to see you in a week or two in New York.

   “So they had Dr. Vernam, and I took what he prescribed, and
   nobody attached any undue importance to the matter.  So I was left
   to myself, and I lay and thought out what I had to do.

“Dear—­I knew there was only one thing to do; I knew whither my love—­our love—­was carrying me—­faster and faster—­spite of all I’d said. Said!  What are words beside such love as ours?  What would be my affection for dad and mother beside my love for you?  Would your loyalty and your dear self-denial continue to help me when they only make me love you more intensely?

“There is only one thing clear in all this pitiful confusion; I—­whom they took and made their child—­cannot sacrifice them!  And yet I would!—­oh, Garry!—­I would for you.  There was no safety for me at all as long as there was the slightest chance to sacrifice everything—­everybody—­and give myself to you.

“Listen!  On the second day after you left I was sitting with mother and Cecile on the terrace.  We were quietly discussing the closing of the house and other harmless domestic matters.  All at once there swept over me such a terrible sense of desolation that I think I lost my mind; for the next thing I knew I was standing in my own room, dressed for travelling—­with a hand-bag in my hand.

“It was my maid knocking that brought me to my senses:  I had been going away to find you; that was all I could realise.  And I sank on my bed, trembling; and presently fell into the grief-stricken lethargy which is all I know now of sleep.

   “But when I woke to face the dreadful day again, I knew the time
   had come.  And I went to mother that evening and told her.