fire in the old Sanctuary and her disappearance, she had permitted him
to see her only at such times and at such intervals as would be
consistent with the most casual of acquaintanceships. He remembered well
enough now her answer to his constant protests, an answer that was
always the same. "Jimmie," she had said, "a sudden intimacy between us
would undo all that you have done--you know that. It would not only
renew, but would be almost proof positive to those who are left of the
Crime Club that their suspicions of Jimmie Dale were justified, and from
that as a starting point it would not take a very clever brain to
identify Jimmie Dale as Larry the Bat--and the Gray Seal. Don't you see!
You never knew me before all the misery and trouble came--there was
nothing between us then. To see too much of each other now, to have too
much in common now would only be to court disaster. Our intimacy must
appear to come gradually, to come naturally. We must wait--a year at
least--Jimmie."

A year! And within a few hours following the last occasion on which she
had said that, Jason, his butler, had laid the morning mail upon the
breakfast table, and he had found her note.

It seemed as though he were living that moment over again now, as he lay
here on the cot in the darkness--his eagerness as he had recognised the
well-known hand amongst the pile of correspondence, the thrill akin to
tenderness with which he had opened the note; and then the utter misery
of it all, the room swirling about him, the blind agony in which he had
risen from his chair, and, as he had groped his way from the room, the
sudden, pitiful anxiety on the faithful old Jason's face, which, even in
his own distress, he had not failed to note and understand and be
grateful for.