"One telegram on your writing-table, my lord."
The servant went on to explain something, Lady Mary Carden, etc., but his master did not hear him. He was in the room in a second, and had closed the door behind him. Lord Francis' beautiful, thin, reckless face was pinched and haggard. He seemed possessed by some fierce passion which had hold of him and drove him before it as a storm holds and spins a leaf.
Mary was frightened, paralysed. She had not known that men could be so moved. He did not even see her. He rushed to the writing-table, and swept his eye over it. Then he gave a sharp, low, hardly human cry of rage and anguish, and turned to ring the bell. As he turned he saw her.
"I beg your pardon. I don't understand," he said hoarsely. "Why did my fool of a servant bring you in here?"
Then he saw the open telegram in her hand, and his face changed. It became alert, cold, implacable. There was a deadly pause. From the room above came the acute, persistent stammer of the piano.
He took the telegram from her nerveless hand, read it, and put it in his pocket. He picked up the envelope from the floor, and threw it into the waste-paper basket. Then he came close up to her, and looked her in the eyes. There was murder in his.
"It was in cypher," he said.
She was incapable of speech.
"But you understood it? Answer me. By—did you understand it, or did you not?"