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 reversed. The General’s usually impassive face was working so painfully that Mrs. Sadgrove half rose from her chair at sight of her husband, checking herself with difficulty; while the Duke bore himself almost jauntily, and began chaffing Sybil about her devotion to Mrs. Talmage Eglinton, who was still, by latest bulletin from Rosa, “suffering ze grand torments” and unable to leave her room.

The afternoon passed without external signs that the house-party was living on the verge of an active volcano. But as it was growing dusk Forsyth, at the risk of being late for dinner, took a solitary walk in the direction of a certain stile, by which the Prior’s Tarrant pastures were approached by a short cut across fields from Tarrant Road railway station. He arrived at the stile in the nick of time to give a helping hand to Mrs. Talmage Eglinton, who had just reached the spot from the opposite direction. The hour was the one when the guests at the house might be expected to be dressing for dinner, and it also tallied with the arrival of a London train at the station; but neither alluded to these incidentals of such an obviously chance meeting.