As he spoke, his eyes, dark and passionate with some forcibly restrained emotion, met hers, and in an instant it seemed as though the thing he must not speak were spoken.

Nan flushed scarlet from brow to throat, her eyes widened, and the breath fluttered unevenly between her parted lips.  She knew—­she knew what Mallory had left unsaid.

“Peter——­”

She held out her hands to him with a sudden childish gesture of surrender, and involuntarily he gathered them into his own.  At the same moment the door opened to admit the maid and he drew back quickly, while Nan’s outstretched hands fell limply to her side.

“This wire’s just come for you, miss,” said the maid, and from her manner it was quite impossible to guess whether she had observed anything unusual or not.  “I took it to Miss Craig by mistake.”

Mechanically Nan extracted the thin sheet from its torn envelope.  As her eyes absorbed the few lines of writing, her face whitened and she drew her breath in sharply.

The next instant, however, she recovered her poise, and crumpling the telegram into a ball she addressed the maid composedly.

“There’s no answer,” she said.  Adding:  “Has anyone arrived yet?”

“Mrs. Seymour is here, miss.  And”—­listening—­“I think Lord St. John must have arrived.”

Nan turned to Mallory.

“Then we’d better go, Peter.  Come along.”

Mallory, as he followed her into the sitting-room, realised that she had all at once retreated a thousand miles away from him.  He wondered what the contents of the telegram could have been.  The oblong red envelope seemed to have descended suddenly between them like a shutter.

Lord St. John, having only just arrived, was still standing as they entered the room, and Nan rushed into apologies as she shook hands with him and kissed Mrs. Seymour.

“Heaps of apologies for not being here when you arrived.  I really haven’t any excuse to offer except”—­with a small gamin smile—­“that I was otherwise occupied!”

“If the occupation was a matter of toilette, we’ll excuse you,” observed St. John, surveying her with the usual masculine approbation of a white frock defined with touches of black.  “The time wasn’t wasted.”

Nan slipped her arm affectionately into his.

“Oh, why aren’t you forty years younger and someone else’s uncle?  You’d be such a charming young man!” she exclaimed.

St. John smiled.

“I was, my dear—­forty years ago.”  And he sighed.

During the next half hour the remainder of the guests came dropping in by twos and threes, and after a little desultory conversation everyone settled down to the serious business of bridge.  Now and then those who were not playing ventured a subdued murmur of talk amongst themselves, but for the most part the silence of the room was only broken by voices declaring trumps in a rapidly ascending scale of values, and then, after a hectic interval, by the same voices calling out the score in varying degrees of satisfaction or otherwise.