She made no reply.

He rose from the table and straightened.

"You wish me to go, Mademoiselle?" he asked.

She hesitated a moment and then with a gasp,

"Yes. You must go--at once."

He shrugged, smiled and turned away. It was too bad.

"Of course I have no right to question you. But I should like to put myself at your command for any service----"

"You can do nothing. Only go, Monsieur."

He looked at her eagerly. There was a change in her manner. She too had at last turned against him. It seemed that she had grown a shade paler, and he saw her eyes staring in a startled way as at some object behind him.

Instinctively he turned. The door into the kitchen was partly open and half through the aperture, distorted with some strange agony, was the face of Kirylo Ivanitch. In the fleeting moment before the Russian emerged it seemed to Rowland that this was the exact expression on the face of the anguished half of the double-bust in the adjoining room, the face of the older man in terror and fury. But he had to admit that in the flesh and blood it was far more convincing.