"I will go to her—I know her room. I can slip it under the door if—if she is asleep; but, perhaps——"
He did not finish that thought audibly. Only opened the door and looked down the dark and silent corridor beyond.
How still it was. He heard a clock striking, somewhere in the silence, two hours after midnight. A strange chill—a feeling of half shame, half uncertainty—held him there on the threshold. There seemed something guilty and wrong about the simple action he intended.
"To think," he muttered to himself, "that a man should actually feel there was something improper in leaving a letter at his own wife's door. Yet, if I were seen, who would believe it?"
He drew the door after him. The whole corridor was in darkness. At the further end stood a marble statue surrounded by tall palms. He had noticed it already during the day. The room next to it was the one he had seen Lady Francis enter.
He moved softly down the long passage. Suddenly he paused, and shrank back into a doorway close at hand. That door beside the statue and the palms was thrown open; a slender white figure stood revealed by the light within the room. At the same moment another figure—the figure of a man—advanced rapidly, and spoke in a low, hurried voice.
