"Who told you this?"
She looked back, holding the open door. "I scarcely know who first mentioned it. I have heard it from so many people,—in fact the news is general property—Captain Gresham of the Guides told me for one. He has just gone back to Peshawur. The news reached him, I believe, from there. Then there was Colonel Cathcart for another. He was talking of it only this afternoon at the Club, saying what a deplorable example it was for an Englishman to set. He and Mr. Bobby Fraser had quite a hot argument about it. Mr. Fraser has such advanced ideas, but I must admit that I rather admire the staunch way in which he defends them. There, dear child! You must not keep me gossiping any longer. You look positively haggard. I earnestly hope a good sleep will restore you, for I cannot possibly take that wan face to the Rajah's ball'."
Lady Bassett departed with the words, shaking her head tolerantly and still smiling.
But for long after she had gone, Muriel remained with fixed eyes and tense muscles, watching, watching, dumbly, immovably, despairingly, at the locked door of her paradise.
So this was the key to his silence—the reason that her message had gone unanswered. She had stretched out her hands to him too late—too late.
And ever through the barren desert of her vigil a man's voice, vital and passionate, rang and echoed in a maddening, perpetual refrain.
"All your life you will remember that I was once yours to take or to throw away. And—you wanted me, yet—you chose to throw me away."
It was a refrain she had heard often and often before; but it had never tortured her as it tortured her now,—now when her last hope was finally quenched—now when at last she fully realised what it was that had once been hers, and that in her tragic blindness she had wantonly cast away.