She remained for a moment tense, passively awaiting co-ordination of her faculties.

Then clear awake, and sending scudding the dear ghosts of the past, she sat up, and catching the indignant spaniel by the collar, looked with a queer, sudden interest at the newcomer.

He was young, extraordinarily beautiful; but he staggered and reeled like a drunken man.

The spaniel barked his respectable disapproval.

In his long life of eighteen months he had seen many people, postmen and butcher boys and casual diggers in kitchen gardens, whose apparent permit to exist in Drane's Court had been an insoluble puzzle; but never had he seen so outrageous a trespasser.