Stella led Lady Verny carefully away from the saucer of milk into the only safe arm-chair; then she sat down on a footstool at her feet.
"I thought," she said in a very quiet voice, "that you'd come, but I didn't think you'd come so soon. I don't know what he's done."
"It's all so extravagant and absurd," said Lady Verny, quickly, "and so utterly unlike Julian! I have never known him to alter an arrangement in his life, and as to breaking his word! I left him happier than I have ever seen him. He'd been telling me that you insisted on my staying with you after your marriage. I told him that I had always thought it a most out-of-place and unsuitable plan, and that he couldn't have two women in our respective positions in his house, and he laughed and said: 'Oh, yes, I can. Stella has informed me that marrying me isn't a position; it's to be looked on in the light of an intellectual convenience. You're to run the house, and she's to run me. I've quite fallen in with it.' I think that was the last thing he said, and when I came back, there was his astounding letter to say that your marriage was impossible, and that I was on no account to send him on your letters or to refer to you in mine.
"He gave me his banker's address, and said that he'd see me later on, and had started some intelligence work for the War Office. He was good enough to add that I might go and see you if I liked. I really think he must be mad, unless you can throw some light on the subject. A letter came from you after he had gone."
Stella, who had been without any color at all, suddenly flushed.
"Ah," she said, "I'm glad he didn't read that before he went! I mean, if he'd gone after reading it, I should have felt—" She put out her hands with a curious little helpless gesture, but she did not say what she would have felt.
"Can't you explain?" Lady Verny asked gravely. "Can't you explain anything? You were perfectly happy, weren't you? I haven't been a blind, meddling, incompetent old idiot, have I?"
Stella shook her head.
"When he left me," she said, "he gave me this." She took it out of her belt and handed it to Lady Verny; it was a check for two hundred pounds inclosed in a piece of paper, on which was written, "Dearest, please!" "I took it," said Stella.
Lady Verny was silent for a moment; then she said more gravely still: