nothing in her words or in his alluded to it.

“I am very much honoured,” Matravers said simply. “I am a rare attendant at the theatre, and your performance gave me great pleasure.”

“I am very glad,” she answered. “Do you know that you made me wretchedly nervous? I was told just as I was going on that you had come to smash us all to atoms in that terrible Day.”

“I came as a critic,” he answered, “but I am a very incompetent one. Perhaps you will appreciate my ignorance more when I tell you that this is my first visit behind the scenes of a theatre.”

But nothing in her words or in his alluded to it

She laughed softly, and they looked around together at the dimly burning gas-lights, the creaking scenery being drawn back from the stage, the woman with a brush and mop sweeping, and at that dismal perspective of holland-shrouded auditorium beyond, now quite deserted.

“At least,” she said, “your impressions cannot be mixed ones. It is hideous here.”

He did not contradict her; and they both ignored Ellison’s murmured compliment.

“It is very draughty,” he remarked, “and you seem cold; we must not keep you here. May we—can I,” he added, glancing down the stone passage, “show you to your carriage?”

She laughed softly.

“You may come with me,” she said, “but our exit is like a rabbit burrow; we must go in single file, and almost on hands and knees.”

She led the way, and they followed her into the street. A small brougham was waiting at the door, and her maid was standing by it. The commissionaire stood away, and Matravers closed the carriage door upon them. Her white, ungloved hand, loaded—overloaded it seemed to him—with rings, stole through the window, and he held it for a moment in his. He felt somehow that he was expected to say something. She was looking at him very intently. There was some powder on her cheeks, which he noted with an instinctive thrill of aversion.

“Shall I tell him home?” he asked.

“If you please,” she answered.

“Madam!” her maid interposed.

“Home, please,” Berenice said calmly. “Good-by, Mr. Matravers.”

“Good night.”

The carriage rolled away. At the corner of the street Berenice pulled the check-string. “The Milan Restaurant,” she told the man briefly.

Matravers and Ellison lit their cigarettes and strolled away on foot. At the corner of the street Ellison had an inspiration.

“Let us,” he said, “have some supper somewhere.”

Matravers shook his head.

“I really have a great deal of work to do,” he said, “and I must write this notice for the Day. I think that I will go straight home.”

Ellison thrust his arm through his companion’s, and called a hansom.

“It will only take us half an hour,” he declared, “and we will go to one of the fashionable places. You will be amused! Come! It all enters, you know, into your revised scheme of life—the attainment of a fuller and more catholic knowledge of your fellow-creatures. We will see our fellow-creatures en fête.”

Matravers suffered himself to be persuaded. They drove to a restaurant close at hand, and stood for a moment at the entrance looking for seats. The room was crowded.

“I will go,” Ellison said, “and find the director. He knows me well, and he will find me a table.”

He elbowed his way up to the further end of the apartment. Matravers remained a somewhat conspicuous figure in the doorway looking from one to another of the little parties with a smile, half amused, half interested. Suddenly his face became grave,—his heart gave an unaccustomed leap! He stood quite still, his eyes fixed upon the bent head and white shoulders of a woman only a few yards away from him. Almost at the same moment Berenice looked up and their eyes met. The colour left her cheeks,—she was ghastly pale! A sentence which she had just begun died away upon her lips; her companion, who was intent upon the wine list, noticed nothing. She made a movement as though to rise. Simultaneously Matravers turned upon his heel and left the room.

Her companion, who was intent upon the wine list, noticed nothing

Ellison came hurrying back in a few moments and looked in vain for his companion. As he stood there watching the throng of people, Berenice called him to her.

“Your friend,” she said, “has gone away. He stood for a moment in the doorway like Banquo’s ghost, and then he disappeared.”

Ellison looked vaguely bewildered.

“Matravers is an odd sort,” he remarked. “I suppose it is one of the penalties of genius to be compelled to do eccentric things. I must have my supper alone.”

“Or with us,” she said. “You know Mr. Thorndyke, don’t you? There is plenty of room here.”

CHAPTER II

Matravers stood at an open window, reading a note by the grey dawn light. Below him stretched the broad thoroughfare of Piccadilly, noiseless, shadowy, deserted. He had thrown up the window overcome by a sudden sense of suffocation, and a chill, damp breeze came stealing in, cooling his parched forehead and hot, dry eyes. For the last two or three hours he had been working with an unwonted and rare zest; it had happened quite by chance, for as a rule he was a man of regular, even mechanical habits. But to-night he scarcely knew himself,—he had all the sensations of a man who had passed through a new and altogether unexpected experience. At midnight he had let himself into his room after that swift, impulsive departure from the Milan, and had dropped by chance into the chair before his writing-table. The sight of his last unfinished sentence, abruptly abandoned in the centre of a neatly written page of manuscript, had fascinated him, and as he sat there idly with the loose sheet in his hands, holding it so that the lamplight might fall upon its very legible characters, an idea flashed into his brain,—an idea which had persistently eluded him for days. With the sudden stimulus of a purely mental activity, he had hastily thrown aside his outdoor garment, and had written for several hours with a readiness and facility which seemed, somehow, for the last few days to have been denied to him.

He had become his old self again,—the events of the evening lay already far behind. Then had come a soft knocking at the door, followed by the apologetic entrance of his servant bearing a note upon which his name was written in hasty characters with an “Immediate” scrawled, as though by an after-thought, upon the left-hand corner. He had torn it open wondering at the woman’s writing, and glanced at its brief contents carelessly enough,—but since then he had done no work. For the present he was not likely