"Yes."
"She's going out to rejoin him."
"What!" Rutton came swiftly back to Amber, his voice shaking. "What did you say?"
"Why, yes. She travels with friends by the western route to join Colonel Farrell at Darjeeling, where he's stationed just now. Shortly after I came down she left; Mrs. Quain had a wire a day or so ago, saying she was on the point of sailing from San Francisco…. Good Lord, Rutton! are you ill?"
Something in the man's face had brought Amber to his feet, a prey to inexpressible concern; it was as if a mask had dropped and he were looking upon the soul of a man in mortal torture.
"No," gasped Rutton, "I'm all right. Besides," he added beneath his breath, so that Amber barely caught the syllables, "it's too late."
As rapidly as he had lost he seemed to regain mastery of his inexplicable emotion. His face became again composed, almost immobile, and stepping to the table he selected a cigarette and rolled it gently between his slim brown fingers. "I'm sorry to have alarmed you," he said, his tone a bit too even not to breed a doubt in the mind of his hearer. "It's nothing serious—a little trouble of the heart, of long standing, incurable—I hope."
Perplexed, yet hesitating to press him further, Amber watched him furtively, instinctively assured that between this man and the Farrells there existed some extraordinary bond; wondering how that could be, convinced in his soul that somehow the entanglement involved the woman he loved, he still feared to put his suspicions to the question, lest he should learn that which he had no right to know … and while he watched was startled by the change that came over Rutton. At ease, one moment, outwardly composed if absorbed in thought, the next he was rigid, every muscle taut, every nerve tense as a steel spring, his keen, thoughtful face hardening with a look of brutal hatred, his eyes narrowing until no more than a glint of fire was visible between the lashes, lips straining apart until they showed thin and bloodless, with a gleam of white, set teeth between. His head jerked back suddenly, his gaze fixing itself first upon the window, then shifting to the door. And his fingers, contracting, tore the cigarette in half.
"Rutton, what the deuce is the matter?"
Rutton seemed not to hear; Amber got his answer from the door, which was swung wide and slammed shut. A blast of frosty air and a flurry of snow swept across the room. And against the door there leaned a man puffing for breath and coughing spasmodically—a gross and monstrous bulk of flesh, unclean and unwholesome to the eye, attired in an extravagant array of coloured garments, tawdry silks and satins clinging, sodden, to his ponderous and unwieldy limbs.