"I deserved what I got, I'm afraid," murmured Ruthven Smith.
"After all, nothing exciting seems likely to happen to-night in this room, in spite of the Countess's prophecy," said Constance. "Perhaps it may be to-morrow or Monday."
"I hope nothing more exciting will happen then than to-night!" Annesley exclaimed, with a kindly glance at her companion. She pitied him, but she pitied herself more, for by and by she and Knight would have to talk this thing out together.
For the first time she dreaded the moment of being alone with her husband. There was a stain of clay on the feet of her idol, and though she had helped him to hide it from other eyes, nothing could be right between them again until she had told him what she thought—until he had promised to make restitution somehow of the thing he should never have possessed.
CHAPTER XIX
THE SECRET
Knight and Annesley had a suite of rooms on the ground floor in what was known as "the new wing" at Valley House. On the floor above were the rooms occupied by Lord and Lady Annesley-Seton.
This wing was a dreadful anachronism, shocking to architects, for it had been tacked on to the house in the eighteenth century by some member of the family who had made the "grand tour" and fallen in love with Italy. Seeing no reason why a classic addition with a high-pillared loggia should be unsuitable to a house in England built in Elizabethan and Jacobean days, he had made it.
Fortunately it was so situated as not to be seen from the front of the building, or anywhere else except from the one side which it deformed; and there a more artistic grandson had hidden the abortion as much as possible by planting a grove of beautiful stone-pines.