"Proficiscere, anima Christiana, de hoc mundo! Go forth upon thy
journey, Christian soul! Go from this world!"

Scattered about the room were _The Nineteenth Century and After_, _The
Quarterly Review_, the _Times_, and several books; among them Goethe's
"Faust," Maspero's "Manual of Egyptian Archæology," "A Companion to
Greek Studies," Guy de Maupassant's "Fort Comme la Mort," D'Annunzio's
"Trionfo della Morte," and Hawthorne's "Scarlet Letter." There was also
a volume of Emerson's "Essays." In a little basket under the
writing-table lay the last number of _The Winning Post_, carefully
destroyed. There were a few pink roses in a vase. In a cage some
canary-birds were singing. The furniture had been pulled about by a
clever hand until the room had lost something of its look of a room in a
smart hotel. The windows were wide open on to the balcony. They
dominated the Thames Embankment, and a light breeze from the water
stirred the white and green curtains that framed them.

Into this pretty and peacefully cheerful chamber Nigel Armine was shown
by a waiter at five o'clock precisely, and left with the promise that
Mrs. Chepstow should be informed of his arrival.

When the door had closed behind the German waiter's back, Nigel stood
for a moment looking around him. This was the first visit he had paid to
Mrs. Chepstow. He sought for traces of her personality in this room in
which she lived. He thought it looked unusually cosy for a room in an
hotel, although he did not discover, as Isaacson would have discovered
in a moment, that the furniture had been deftly disarranged. His eyes
roved quickly: no photographs, no embroideries, one or two extra
cushions, birds, a few perfect roses, a few beautifully bound books, the
windows widely opened to let the air stream in. And there was an open