"That—that woman!" replied Rose again, unable to bring herself to mention the name.
"Oh," exclaimed her brother absently, but starting up from his reverie. "Oh, very well; show her in," he directed. His tone and gesture indicated that nothing mattered now.
Rose was evidently surprised at her brother's instruction and for once inclined to protest the supremacy of his will.
"You are not going to see her again?" she argued.
"I know of no one who should be in greater need of seeing me," John rejoined, with sadness and reproach mingled in equal parts.
"But alone? Think of the danger!"
"Seeing her alone has done about all the harm it could do," the brother replied, with a disconsolate toss of his hands, while the drawn look upon his face became more pronounced. "Show her in!"
Rose turned back with a cough eloquent of dissenting judgment and left the door flung wide. John at his distance sensed her feeling of outrage in the fierce rustling of her skirts as she receded down the hall, and presently heard her voice saying icily: "The open door!"
The minister smiled, with half-guilty satisfaction. His sister had refused Miss Dounay the courtesy of her escort to the study. He suspected that Rose had even refused to look at the visitor again, but having indicated the direction in which the open door stood, had whisked indignantly beyond into her own preserves.
The hour was now something after sunset, and the room was half in gloom. The actress paused inside the door, standing stiffly. Hampstead sat before his desk, his elbows on the arms of his chair, his hands hanging limp, his shoulders drooping, his eyes cast down and fixed. He was again thinking. He had a good many things to think about. The coming of the actress brought one more. He was not utterly despondent, but he had been brought to the verge of catastrophe; perhaps beyond the verge. The woman against whom he had done no wrong, and who had brought him to the precipice, now stood in his room, the place of all places in which he could feel the desolation creeping round his soul like rising waters about a man trapped by the tide in some ocean cavern. But the minister was not now thinking of that. Instead his mind recalled wonderingly that fleeting picture of this woman in court, with her eyes gleaming savagely at Searle and crouching like a tigress about to spring.