Many of the candles had guttered to the socket and gone out; only two or three, burning ghostly before the tall mirrors, remained to cast a light through the darkened room.
Silence and loneliness were abroad; the Countess gazed up at the infinite distance of the stars and shivered through her slender body; against the sky rose a misty vision often seen by her: the vision of a man with a beautiful face and clothes clay-stained and bloody, holding a lace cravat and looking at her with mournful eyes.
She smiled bitterly as she thought of the uselessness of that blood on her soul; Jerome Caryl might have lived. An obscure traitor had informed and the plot to be carried out at Turnham Green had come to nothing.
She turned from the stars and her eyes sought her husband.
“Jock!” she cried, and there was a world of tenderness, of appeal, of passion in her voice. “Jock!”
She crossed the great shadowy room to where he sat and went on her knees beside him.
“I did it for ye,” she murmured, as if answering an accusation. “Jock—I hae served ye weel?”
He took her hands in his and smiled down at her.
“Peggy, ye ken vera weel ye are all the world to me,” he said most tenderly.
Her head drooped against his arm.