n error on
the part of nature; and Diane--oh, the pity of it!--had put herself down
on the man's level with a naivete which showed her unconscious of ever
having been higher up. She had confessed to weaknesses, as though she
were of no finer clay than himself, and spoke of being penitent, when
the tragedy lay in the fact that a woman should have anything to repent
of.

The minutes went by, but he sat rigid, with hands clinched before him,
and eyes fixed in a kind of hypnotic stare on the cluster of lights,
taking no account of time or place. Throughout the house there was the
stillness of midnight, broken only by the rumble of a carriage or the
clatter of a motor in the street. The silence was the more ghostly owing
to the circumstance that throughout the empty rooms lights were still
flaring uselessly, welcoming his return. Presently there came a
sound--faint, soft, swift, like the rustle of wings, or a weird spirit
footfall. Though it was scarcely audible, it was certain that something
was astir.

With a start Derek came back from the contemplation of his intolerable
pain to the world of common happenings. He must see what could be moving
at this unaccustomed hour; but he had barely risen in his place when he
was disturbed by still another sound, this time louder and heavier, and
characterized by a certain brusque finality. It was the closing of a
door; it was the closing of the large, ponderous street-door. Some one
had left the house.

In a dozen strides he was out in the hail and on the stairway. There, on
the landing, where an hour or two ago he had turned to look down upon
Diane, stood Dorothea in her night-dress--a little white figure, scared
and trembling.

"Oh, father, Diane has gone away!"

For some seconds he stared at her blankly, like a man who puzzles over
something in a strange language. When he spoke, at last, his voice came
with a forced harshness, from which the girl shrank back, more terrified
than before:

"She was quite right to go. You run back to bed."

XII

From the shelter of the little French hostelry in University Place,
Diane wrote, on the following morning, to Miss Lucilla van Tromp,
telling her as briefly and discreetly as possible what had occurred.
While withholding names and suppressing the detail which dealt with the
manner of her husband's death, she spoke with her characteristic
frankness, stating her case plainly. Though she denied the main charge,
she repeated t