" she said at last. "You understand. I have always
seen that you know. . ." Then she whispered, "How did you know?"

"Know?" He was bewildered, but before she could speak again the door
opened and Margaret Craven came in.

She moved with that restrained emotion that he had seen in her when he
had first met her. She was some great force held in check, some fire
that blazed but must be hidden from the world, and as she bent over
her mother and kissed her the embrace had in it something of passionate
protest; both women seemed to assert in it their right to quite another
sort of life.

He saw that his moment with Mrs. Craven had passed. That fire, that
humanity had gone from her and she lay back now on her sofa with the
faint waxen lids closed upon her eyes, her hands thinly folded, almost a
dead woman.

Margaret kissed her again--now softly and gently, and Olva went with her
from the room.

3

He was prepared to find that Rupert had told her everything. He thought
that he saw in the gravity and sadness of her manner, and also in the
silence that she seemed deliberately at first to place between them,
that she was waiting for the right moment to break it to him. He felt
that she would ask him gravely and with great kindness, but that, in the
answer that he would give her, it must be all over . . . the end. The
pursuit would be concluded.

Then suddenly in the way that she looked at him he knew that she had
been told nothing.

"I'm afraid that mother is very unwell. I'm afraid that you must have
found her so."

"If she could get away---" he began.

"Ah! if we could all get away! If only we could! But we have talked of
that before. It is quite impossible. And, even if we could (and how glad
I should be!), I do not know that it would help mother. It is Rupert
that is breaking her heart!"

"Rupert!"

For answer to his exclamation she cried to him with all the pent-up
suffering and loneliness of the last weeks in her voice--

"Ah, Mr. Dune, help me! I shall go mad if something doesn't happen;
every day it is worse and I can't grapple with it. I'm not up to it.
If only they'd speak out! but it's this silence!" She seemed to pull
herself together and went on more quietly: "You know that Rupert and I
have been everything to one another all our lives. We have never had
a secret of any kind. Until this last month Rupert was the most open,
dearest boy in the world. His tenderness with my mother was a most
wonderf