his eyes and a few silver threads in his black hair. He
smiled at me; but it was the smile of a man who has suffered, and known
a hell of loneliness.

It was Robert who spoke first, saying entirely commonplace things in the
beautiful voice that used to thrill London. He was so glad to see me!
How nice it was of me to come! Then, suddenly, he remembered something.
I could _see_ him remembering. He remembered that he was supposed to be
away.

"I ought to be in France," he said. "All my arrangements are made to go.
Yet I haven't got off. I'm glad now that I haven't."

"So am I, very glad," I echoed. "I should have been too disappointed!
But--I _felt_ you wouldn't be gone."

He looked somewhat startled.

"I always was a procrastinator," he said. "Come into my study, won't
you?"

Still holding me by the hand he led me like a child into the room out of
which he had shot--an adorable room, with a beamed ceiling and
diamond-paned windows looking under trees to the river. In front of his
desk--where he could glance up for inspiration as he wrote--was a
life-sized portrait of June, by Sargent; June in the gray dress and hat
she had worn the day she promised--no, _offered_--to marry Robert.

"You see!" he said, with a slight gesture toward the picture, with its
bunched red-bronze hair and brilliant eyes of blue, "this is where I sit
and work."

"And where used Joyce Arnold to sit and work?" something in me blurted
out.

The man winced--just visibly--no more. His eyes flashed to mine a kind
of challenge. There was sudden anger in it, and pleading as well. Then,
of course, I _knew_--all I had come to find out. And he must have known
that I knew!

But I'd come for a great deal more than finding out.

I don't think I'm a coward, yet I was dreadfully frightened--in a blue
funk of doing or saying the wrong thing at a moment when it might be
"now or never." My knees felt like badly poached eggs with no toast to
repose upon. I lost my head a little, and what I did I didn't do really,
because it did itself.

I looked as scared as I felt, and gasped: "Oh, _Robert_!" (I'd never
called him "Robert" to his face before; only behind his back.)

My face of fright deflected his rage. You can't be furious with a
quivering jelly! But he didn't speak. The challenge in his eyes softened
to reproach. Then he looked at the portrait.

"Miss Arnold sat where she, too, could see June," he answered quietly.

"Poor, poor Joyce!" I said. "