Dominey turned away towards the stairs.

“We will discuss this again before we leave,” he said gloomily.

Dominey was admitted at once by her maid into his wife’s sitting-room.  Rosamund, in a charming morning robe of pale blue lined with grey fur, had just finished breakfast.  She held out her hands to him with a delighted little cry of welcome.

“How nice of you to come, Everard!” she exclaimed.  “I was hoping I should see you for a moment before you went off.”

He raised her fingers to his lips and sat down by her side.  She seemed entirely delighted by his presence, and he felt instinctively that she was quite unaffected by the event of the night before.

“You slept well?” he enquired.

“Perfectly,” she answered.

He tackled the subject bravely, as he had made up his mind to on every opportunity.

“You do not lie awake thinking of our nocturnal visitor, then?”

“Not for one moment.  You see,” she went on conversationally, “if you were really Everard, then I might be frightened, for some day or other I feel that if Everard comes here, the spirit of Roger Unthank will do him some sort of mischief.”

“Why?” he asked.

“You don’t know about these things, of course,” she went on, “but Roger Unthank was in love with me, although I had scarcely ever spoken to him, before I married Everard.  I think I told you that much yesterday, didn’t I?  After I was married, the poor man nearly went out of his mind.  He gave up his work and used to haunt the park here.  One evening Everard caught him and they fought, and Roger Unthank was never seen again.  I think that any one around here would tell you,” she went on, dropping her voice a little, “that Everard killed Roger and threw him into one of those swampy places near the Black Wood, where a body sinks and sinks and nothing is ever seen of it again.”

“I do not believe he did anything of the sort,” Dominey declared.

“Oh, I don’t know,” she replied doubtfully.  “Everard had a terrible temper, and that night he came home covered with blood, looking—­awful!  It was the night when I was taken ill.”

“Well no more tragedies,” he insisted.  “I have come up to remind you that we have guests here.  When are you coming down to see them?”

She laughed like a child.

“You say ‘we’ just as though you were really my husband,” she declared.

“You must not tell any one else of your fancy,” he warned her.

She acquiesced at once.

“Oh, I quite understand,” she assured him.  “I shall be very, very careful.  And, Everard, you have such clever guests, not at all the sort of people my Everard would have had here, and I have been out of the world for so long, that I am afraid I sha’n’t be able to talk to them.  Nurse Alice is tremendously impressed.  I am sure I should be terrified to sit at the end of the table, and Caroline will hate not being hostess any longer.  Let me come down at tea-time and after dinner, and slip into things gradually.  You can easily say that I am still an invalid, though of course I’m not at all.”