They looked at each other in silence; she laid one hand on the banisters as though to steady herself. With the other she held out to him a flower.
When he had gone with his flower, and when the whir of his motor car had died away in that silent house, she turned to ascend the stairs again, stumbled, dropped by the rail, and lay there huddled in a heap, both hands pressed desperately over her quivering face.
Then in the room above, the sick man groaned; and she straightened up and rose as though a trumpet had sounded. And slowly, steadily, she mounted her Calvary, drying her eyes naïvely and like a little girl who has been hurt and whose grief seems hopeless, inconsolable, and never ending.
Slowly, side by side, his arm once more in her possession, Warner and Philippa returned to the Château.
When they reached the terrace, the stars overhead had become magnificent; millions and millions of them sparkled up there, arching the dark earth with necklaces of light.
He turned and gazed out over the panorama of the night. Far in the east the silver pencil of a searchlight swept the heavens.
Into the mysterious east he stared in silence, thinking of Wildresse.
The Orient had hatched out Wildresse; Biribi had caught him; Biribi had utterly extinguished his race at last.
The mysterious irony of it—the death of this man's only son—the fate that had delivered the father into the crime-blotched hands of that terrible battalion—the hazard of Asticot's discovery in the safe—the sudden, dramatic unmasking of Cassilis—could these things be happening in this year of 1914?
Stranger things than these were happening, and he knew it.