behind Straker with a soft sigh.

The long room was dim and apparently deserted. Drawn blinds obscured
the lucid summer night behind the three windows opposite the door.
One small electric globe hung lit under its opaline veil in the
corner by the end window on the right.

Straker at the doorway turned on the full blaze of the great ring
that hung above the central table where he meant to work. It
revealed, seated on the lounge in the inner, the unilluminated
corner on the right, Miss Tarrant and Laurence Furnival.

To his intense relief, Straker perceived that the whole length of
the lounge was between the two. Miss Tarrant at her end was sitting
bolt upright with her scarf gathered close about her; she was
looking under her eyelids and down her beautiful nose at Furnival,
who at his end was all huddled among the cushions as if she had
flung him there. Their attitudes suggested that their interview had
ended in distance and disaster. The effect was so marked that
Straker seized it in an instant.

He was about to withdraw as noiselessly as he had entered, but Miss
Tarrant (not Furnival; Furnival had not so much as raised his
head)--Miss Tarrant had seen him and signed to him to stay.

"You needn't go," she said. "_I'm_ going."

She rose and passed her companion without looking at him, in a sort
of averted and offended majesty, and came slowly down the room.
Straker waited by the door to open it for her.

On the threshold she turned to him and murmured: "Don't go away. Go
in and talk to him--about--about anything."

It struck him as extraordinary that she should say this to him, that
she should ask him to go in and see what she had done to the man.

The door swung on her with its soft sigh, shutting him in with
Furnival. He hesitated a moment by the door.

"Come in if you want to," said Furnival. "I'm going, too."

He had risen, a little unsteadily. As he advanced, Straker saw that
his face bore traces of violent emotion. His tie was a little
crooked and his hair pushed from the forehead that had been hidden
by his hands. His moustache no longer curled crisply upward; it hung
limp over his troubled mouth. Furnival looked as if he had been
drinking. But Furnival did not drink. Straker saw that he meant in
his madness to follow Philippa.

He turned down the lights that beat on him.

"Don't," said Furnival. "I'm going all right."

Straker held the door to. "I wouldn't," he said, "if I were you. Not
yet."