"I'll go," he said.
"Wait!" she said, and she stretched out her hand with the whip in it. "Austin, this—this, must be stopped, prevented——" she spoke with a panting breathlessness. "You—you understand. It must be prevented, at all costs, at any risks! You will do it! Promise me! Remember our bargain! Ask what you please, I will grant it. Half—every penny I possess—anything! You will prevent it!"
He stood looking at her without an atom of expression on his clean-cut face, which might have been a marble mask.
"I understand," he said, after the pause. "At any cost? You will not upbraid, reproach me in the future, whatever may happen?"
"No. I shall not! At any cost!" she repeated, meeting his cold glance.
He stood regarding the wall above her head for a moment, then, without a word, went out and left her.
Slowly, impassively, he paced down the stairs, his eyes fixed on the open doorway and the street beyond, but reaching the hall, which happened to be empty, he paused, and with his foot on the doorstep, he turned round and smiled.
It was a peculiar smile and difficult to analyze, but supposing a man had caught a wild animal in a trap and had left it hard and fast, to be killed at his leisure, that man might smile as Austin Ambrose smiled as he looked round the hall of Violet Graham's house in Park Lane.