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 her neck and at the sleeves. Her hair was rolled into a pile on the top of her head and the sunlight from the orchard was shining upon it.

When Peter called her name she turned round with a startled cry and put her hand to her throat. Then she moved back against the window as though she were afraid that he was going to touch her.

He noticed her movement and the words that he had intended to say were checked on his lips. He stammered, instead, something about going out. She nodded her head; she had pulled herself together and walked towards him from the window.

“Won't you come, too? It is such a lovely day,” he asked her.

“I've got a headache.”

“It'll do your headache good.”

But she shook her head—“No, I'm going upstairs to lie down.”

She moved past him to the door. Then with her hand on it she turned back to him:—

“Peter, I—” she said.

She seemed to appeal to him with her eyes beseeching, trying to say something, but the rest of her face was dumb.

The appeal, the things that she would have said suddenly died, leaving her face utterly without expression.

“Bobby and mother are coming to dinner to-night, aren't they?”

“Yes—”

She passed through the door across the sunlit hall, up the dark stairs. She walked with that hesitating halting step that he knew so well; her small, white hand lay, for a moment on the banisters—then she had disappeared.

Coming through the hall Peter noticed that there was a letter in the box. He took it out and found, with delight, that it was from Stephen Brant. He had had no word from him since the day when he and Mr. Zanti had paid their fateful visit.

The letter said;—