AN INTRUDER
“And you?”
“I could do a turn on steel spikes,” he laughed.
“Your arm?”
“Right as rain. It’s nothing at all.”
Doris accepted the situation without a word. Indeed she was numbed with the fatigue of strained nerves. The swift rush of incident since Betty’s London dinner, with its rapid alternations of hope and fear, had left her bewildered and helpless. But it was the interview with Cyril tonight that had plunged her into the dark abyss of despair. She had tried so hard to believe in him, but he would do nothing to take away the weight that had been dragging her down further and further from the light. A new kind of love had come to her, born of the new Cyril who had won her over by the sheer force of a personality, the existence of which she had not dreamed. A short time ago she had wanted to see him awake—a firebrand—and she had had her wish, for she had kindled to his touch like tinder. But tonight, in her utter weariness, it seemed as though her spirit was charred, burnt to a cinder, like the package of papers in the grate in the gun-room, destroyed, as the secret message had been, in the great game that Cyril was playing.
She undressed slowly, listening for any sounds that might come from the room next door, but the only sign she had of him was the familiar smell of his pipe tobacco which came through the cracks and key-hole. A little later Betty Heathcote came in prepared for what she called a “back hair talk,” but found her guest so unresponsive that at last she went into her own room and bed. Doris lay for a while watching the line of light under Cyril’s door, wondering what he was doing and what the night was to bring forth. One memory
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