to know what he had better do with letters or telegrams which might
arrive in the course of the day.

"Letters addressed to Miss de Barral, you had better bring over to my
hotel over there," said Fyne beginning to feel extremely worried about
the future. The man said "Yes, sir," adding, "and if a letter comes
addressed to Mrs. . . . "

Fyne stopped him by a gesture. "I don't know . . . Anything you like."

"Very well, sir."

The butler did not shut the street door after Fyne, but remained on the
doorstep for a while, looking up and down the street in the spirit of
independent expectation like a man who is again his own master. Mrs.
Fyne hearing her husband return came out of the room where the girl was
lying in bed. "No change," she whispered; and Fyne could only make a
hopeless sign of ignorance as to what all this meant and how it would
end.

He feared future complications--naturally; a man of limited means, in a
public position, his time not his own. Yes. He owned to me in the
parlour of my farmhouse that he had been very much concerned then at the
possible consequences. But as he was making this artless confession I
said to myself that, whatever consequences and complications he might
have imagined, the complication from which he was suffering now could
never, never have presented itself to his mind. Slow but sure (for I
conceive that the Book of Destiny has been written up from the beginning
to the last page) it had been coming for something like six years--and
now it had come. The complication was there! I looked at his unshaken