She had refused point-blank to receive him, and for all that with a humility entirely foreign to him he had induced a servant to return to her with a most urgent message, yet he had been denied.

He returned stricken to Penarrow, there to find his brother awaiting him in a passion of impatience.
"Well ?" Lionel greeted him.

"What will you do now ?" Sir Oliver looked at him from under brows that scowled darkly in reflection of his thoughts.
"Do now?
Of what do you talk ?" quoth he.
"Have you not heard ?" And Lionel told him the news.
Sir Oliver stared long at him when he had done, then his lips tightened and he smote his brow.
"So!" he cried.

"Would that be why she refused to see me?
Did she conceive that I went perhaps to plead?
Could she think that?
Could she ?" He crossed to the fireplace and stirred the logs with his boot angrily.
"Oh! 'Twere too unworthy.

Yet of a certainty 'tis her doing, this." "What shall you do ?" insisted Lionel, unable to repress the question that was uppermost in his mind; and his voice shook.
"Do ?" Sir Oliver looked at him over his shoulder.