“I wonder whether you know that we have met before, Miss Thurwell?” he asked her suddenly.

She moved her screen and looked at him.

“Surely not!  Where?”

In a few words he reminded her of that quaint street in the old Italian town, and of the half-ruined Palazzo di Vechi.  He had seen her only for a few minutes, but her face had never been forgotten; the way in which he told her so, although he did not dwell upon it, told her also that it had been no ordinary memory ­that it had held a separate place in his thoughts, as was indeed the case.  Something in the manner of his allusion to it showed her too, as though he had laid his whole mind bare, with what interest, almost reverence, he had guarded it, and all that it had meant to him; and as she listened a faint color stole into her cheeks, with which the fire had nothing to do.  She held her screen the closer, and bent her head lest he should see it.

But there was no fear of that; indeed, he had no thought of the kind.  Leaving the dangerous ground behind him, he glided easily and naturally into impersonal subjects.  From Italy he began to talk of Florence, of Pico della Mirandola, and the painters of the Renaissance.  He strove his utmost to interest her, and with his vast stock of acquired knowledge, and his wonderfully artistic felicity of expression, he talked on and on, wandering from country to country, and age to age, till it all seemed to her like a strangely beautiful poem, full of yellow light and gleaming shadow, sometimes passionate and intense, at others fantastic and almost ethereal.  Now and then she half closed her eyes, and his words, and their meaning, the form and the substance, seemed to come to her like richly blended music, stirring all her senses and quickening all her dormant faculties.  Then she opened them again, and looked steadily upon the dark, wan face, with its sharp thin outline and strange poetic abstraction.  By chance he spoke for a moment of De Quincey, and a shudder passed through all her being.  Could such a face as that be a murderer’s face?  The utter morbidness of such a thought oppressed her only for a moment.  If to-morrow it was to be her duty to loathe this man, then it should be so; but those few minutes were too precious to be disturbed by such thoughts.  A new life was stirring within her, and its first breath was too sweet to be crushed on the threshold.  After to-night ­anything!  But to-night she would have for her own.

And so the time passed on, and the evening slipped away.  Mr. Thurwell had looked in, but seeing them so engrossed he had quietly retreated and indulged in his usual nap.  A dainty tea equipage had been brought in, and she had roused herself to prepare it with her own hands, and it seemed to him that this little touch of domesticity had been the one thing wanted to make the picture perfect.  There had been a momentary silence then, and she had found herself asking him questions.

“Do you never feel that you would like to be back in the world again?” she asked.  “Yours is a very lonely life!”

“I do not often find it so,” he answered, with his eyes fixed upon the fire.  “One’s books, and the thoughts one gets from them, are sufficient companions.”

“But they are not human ones, and man is human.  Do you think a lonely life quite healthy ­mentally healthy, I mean?”

“It should be the healthiest of all lives.  It is only in theory that solitude is morbid.  If you knew more of the world, Miss Thurwell, you would understand something of its cramping influence upon all independent thought.  I am not a pessimist ­at least, I try not to be.  I do not wish to say that there is more badness than goodness in the world, but there is certainly more littleness than greatness.  To live in any manner of society without imbibing a certain form of selfishness is difficult; to do so and to taste the full sweetness of the life that never dies is impossible!”

“But there must be some exceptions!” she said hesitatingly.  “If people care for one another, and care for the same things ­”

He shook his head.

“People never do care for one another.  Life is so full nowadays, there are so many things to care about, that any concentration of the affections is impossible.  Love is the derision of the modern world.  It has not even the respect one pays to the antique.”

For several minutes there was deep silence.  A piece of burning wood tumbled off from the log and fell upon the tiles, where it lay with its delicate blue smoke curling upward into the room, laden with the pungent odor of the pine.  She moved her feet, and there was the slight rustling of her skirts.  No other sound broke the stillness which they both remembered for long afterwards ­the stillness before the storm.

Suddenly it came to an end.  There was a sound of doors being quickly opened and shut, voices in the hall, and then a light, firm tread, crossing the main portion of the room.  They both glanced toward the curtains, and there was a second’s expectancy.  Then they were thrown on one side with a hasty movement, and a tall dark woman in a long traveling cloak swept through them.

She paused for a moment on the threshold, and her flashing black eyes seemed to take in every detail of the little scene.  She saw Helen, fair and comely, with an added beauty in her soft, animated expression, and she saw her companion, his face alight with intelligence and sensibility, and with the glow of a new life in his brilliant eyes.  The perfume of the Egyptian tobacco which hung about the room, the tea tray, their two chairs drawn up before the fire ­nothing escaped her.  It all seemed to increase her wrath.

For she was very angry.  Her form was dilated with passion, and her voice, when she spoke, shook with it.  But it was not her anger, nor her threatening gestures, before which they both shrank back for a moment, appalled.  It was her awful likeness to the murdered Sir Geoffrey Kynaston.

“Helen!” she cried, “they told me of this; but if I had not seen it with my own eyes, I would never have believed it.”

Helen rose to her feet, pale, but with a kindling light in her eyes, and a haughty poise of her fair shapely head.

“You speak in riddles, Rachel,” she said quietly.  “I do not understand you.”

A very storm of hysterical passion seemed to shake the woman, who had approached a little further into the room.

“Not understand me!  Listen, and I will make it plain.  You were engaged to marry my brother.  I come here, almost from his funeral, and I find you thus ­with his murderer!  Girl, I wonder that you do not die of shame!”

His murderer!  For a moment the color fled from cheeks and lips, and the room seemed whirling around her.  But one glance at him brought back her drooping courage.  He was standing close to her side, erect and firm as a statue, with his head thrown back, and his eyes fixed upon Rachel Kynaston.  Blanched and colorless as his face was, there was no flinching in it.

“It is false!” she said proudly.  “Ask him yourself.”

“Ask him!” She turned upon him like a tigress, her eyes blazing with fury.  “Let him hear what I have to say, and deny it.  Is it not you who followed him from city to city all over the world, seeking always his life?  Is it not you who kept him for many years from his native land for fear of blood-shed ­yours or his?  Is it not you who have fought with him and been worsted, and sworn to carry your enmity with you through life, and bury it only in his grave?  Look at me, man, if you dare, look me in the face and tell me whether you did not seek his life in Vienna, and whether you did not fight with him on the sands at Boulogne.  Oh, I know you!  It is you!  It is you!  And then you come down here and live alone, waiting your chance.  He is found foully murdered, and you are the only man who could have done it.  Ask you whether you be guilty?  There is no need, no need.  Can anyone in their senses, knowing the story of your past hate, doubt it for one moment?  And yet, answer me if you can.  Look me in the face, and let me hear you lie, if you dare.  Tell me that you know nothing of my brother’s death!”

He had stood like marble, with never a change in his face, while she had poured out her passionate accusation.  But when silence came, and she waited for him to speak, he could not.  A seal seemed set upon his lips.  He could not open them.  He was silent.

A fearful glare of triumph blazed up in her eyes.  She staggered back a little, and leaned upon the table, with her hand clasped to her side.

“See, Helen,” she cried, “is that innocence?  O God! give me strength to go on.  I will see Mr. Thurwell.  I will tell him everything.  He shall sign a warrant.  Ah!”

A terrible scream rang through the room, and echoed through the house.  Mr. Thurwell and several of the servants came hurrying in.  In the middle of the floor Rachel Kynaston lay prostrate, her fingers grasping convulsively at the empty air, and an awful look in her face.  Helen was on her knees by her side, and Mr. Brown stood in the background, irresolute whether to stay or leave.

They crowded round her, but she waved them off, and grasping Helen’s wrist, dragged her down till their heads nearly touched.

“Helen,” she moaned, “I am dying.  Swear to me that you will avenge Geoffrey’s murder.  That man did it.  His name ­his name ­”

Suddenly her grasp relaxed, and Helen reeled back fainting into her father’s arms.

“It is a fit,” some one murmured.

But it was death.