But she shook her head—“No, I'm going upstairs to lie down.”
She moved past him to the door. Then with her hand on it she turned back to him:—
“Peter, I—” she said.
She seemed to appeal to him with her eyes beseeching, trying to say something, but the rest of her face was dumb.
The appeal, the things that she would have said suddenly died, leaving her face utterly without expression.
“Bobby and mother are coming to dinner to-night, aren't they?”
“Yes—”
She passed through the door across the sunlit hall, up the dark stairs. She walked with that hesitating halting step that he knew so well: her small, white hand lay, for a moment on the banisters—then she had disappeared.
IV
Coming through the hall Peter noticed that there was a letter in the box. He took it out and found, with delight, that it was from Stephen Brant. He had had no word from him since the day when he and Mr. Zanti had paid their fateful visit.