ight shade of annoyance. "What on earth should there be? As I
told you, I've never in my life heard any one say two words about Miss
Viner."

Anna made no answer and they continued to face each other without
moving. For the moment she had ceased to think about Sophy Viner and
Owen: the only thought in her mind was that Darrow was alone with her,
close to her, and that, for the first time, their hands and lips had not
met.

He glanced back doubtfully at the window. "It's pouring. Perhaps you'd
rather not go out?"

She hesitated, as if waiting for him to urge her. "I suppose I'd better
not. I ought to go at once to my mother-in-law--Owen's just been telling
her," she said.

"Ah." Darrow hazarded a smile. "That accounts for my having, on my way
up, heard some one telephoning for Miss Painter!"

At the allusion they laughed together, vaguely, and Anna moved toward
the door. He held it open for her and followed her out.

XIX

He left her at the door of Madame de Chantelle's sitting-room, and
plunged out alone into the rain.

The wind flung about the stripped tree-tops of the avenue and dashed the
stinging streams into his face. He walked to the gate and then turned
into the high-road and strode along in the open, buffeted by slanting
gusts. The evenly ridged fields were a blurred waste of mud, and
the russet coverts which he and Owen had shot through the day before
shivered desolately against a driving sky.

Darrow walked on and on, indifferent to the direction he was taking. His
thoughts were tossing like the tree-tops. Anna's announcement had not
come to him as a complete surprise: that morning, as he strolled back
to the house with Owen Leath and Miss Viner, he had had a momentary
intuition of the truth. But it had been no more than an intuition, the
merest faint cloud-puff of surmise; and now it was an attested fact,
darkening over the whole sky.

In respect of his own attitude, he saw at once that the discovery made
no appreciable change. If he had been bound to silence before, he was no
less bound to it now; the only difference lay in the fact that what he
had just learned had rendered his bondage more intolerable. Hitherto
he had felt for Sophy Viner's defenseless state a sympathy profoundly
tinged with compunction. But now he was half-conscious of an obscure
indignation against her. Superior as he had fancied himself to
ready-made judgments, he was aware of cherishing the common doubt as to
the