left the smoking-room and went upstairs. His wife had gone some quarter of an hour before, but Mr. Palmer had detained him talking. He tapped at her bedroom door; her maid opened it, and after a moment he was admitted. She was sitting before her glass in a blue silk and lace dressing-gown, and her hair, a rippling sheet of molten gold, was streaming down her back.
' You want to speak to me?' she asked.
' If I may.'
' You can go,' she said to the maid. ' I will send for you if I want you.'
Amelie got up, smoothing her hair back behind her ears. If she had been the most finished coquette, she would have done exactly that; art would have imitated the complete naturalness of the movement. Her face was very pale, and looked infinitely weary, but its beauty, the beauty of that falling river of gold, the beauty of her bare arm, and the gentle swell of her bosom, half seen through the low opening of the neck of her dressing-gown, had never been more dazzling. But her eyes were lustreless; they looked on him as on a stranger.
' What is it?' she asked.
He tried to school his tongue to begin, but for the moment it would not.
' Would to-morrow do as well?' asked Amelie. ' I am rather tired.'
' No; I want to tell you to-night,' said he. ' It is about Mrs. Emsworth.'
She flushed, and turned her head a little away.
' I do not care to hear,' she said.
' I must tell you, all the same,' he said.
She shrugged her shoulders ever so slightly.
' I cannot prevent you,' she said.
She sat down by her toilet-table, turning only a shoulder to him, and with her cool white hands idly arranged the
