again the startled,
haggard expression on his face. "What should have happened?"

"I don't know," Rachel said, startled too at his look and manner. "You
look so tired, so ill."

"Oh, I'm all right," he said, taking up and drinking eagerly the cup of
tea that almost mechanically she had poured out and pushed towards him,
and as he did so he realised that he had had no food since the morning.
He ate and drank and then again lay back in his chair and was silent. As
Rachel looked at him the absolute conviction swept over her--she knew
not why--that he had been concerned in the terrible catastrophe of which
she had heard the broken accounts. It began to dawn upon her that in
some inconceivable way the thing had happened to him; that it was of him
those women were speaking. She still heard Lady Adela saying: "Did you
ever see any one look so awful?" And yet what could it be? What horrible
misunderstanding was it? What horrible mistake could have been made?

She sat and waited. Not the least of her charms was that she knew, what
many women do not know, how to sit absolutely quiet. She knew when to
refrain from questioning, how to sit by her companion in so peaceful, so
final a manner, as it were, that he did not feel that she was simply
waiting for what he would do next.

The band blared out again with renewed vigour. Rendel leant his elbows
on his knees, his face between his hands.

"Oh! that miserable noise!" he said. "Will it never leave off? The
hideousness of it all!--those people, that band! Oh! to get away from it
all!" he muttered half to himself.

"Frank," said Rachel entreatingly, touching his arm, "if you don't like
it why shouldn't we go away from it? I think it is horrible, too. I went
out of the garden to-day to where the people were walking."

Rendel looked up quickly.

"Did you? Did you see any one you knew?"

"Yes," said Rachel; "I saw Mr. Pateley."

"Pateley!" said her husband. "Did you have any talk with him? What did
he say?"

"Hardly anything," said Rachel. "He was surprised to see me, and asked
how long we had been here, and if he might come and see us. That was
all."

"That was all," echoed Rendel, again with an inward shiver. "Coming to
see us, is he?"

That encounter for the moment he must at any cost avoid.

"Frank, I wonder if we must go on staying here?" Rachel said.

"Of course we must," Rendel replied, trying to pull himself together
again. "Dr. Morgan said that this was the ve