The radiance of Miss Wolcott's face was still lingering in Lyon's mind and diffusing a glow over his imagination when he crossed the few steps that separated her house from Broughton's. Broughton opened the door for him, as he had formed the habit of doing. The anguished and despairing inquiry in his eyes pulled Lyon up sharply. He had come from the morning to night, from the hope of youth to the sorrow of age, from those whose story was to end happily to those who knew in their own hearts the tragedy of life.

"You have nothing to tell me?" Broughton asked, though his tone showed he expected nothing.

Lyon shook his head, "No. You have heard nothing?"

"Nothing. Nothing. Nothing."

From habit he led Lyon into the dining room, where they had always sat to smoke before retiring, but the room showed no preparations for an evening of good cheer. It was as blank and forlorn as Broughton's face.

"Where can she be?" he demanded, stopping in his restless walk to face Lyon imperiously. "Ill as she was, with God knows what trouble on her mind and conscience, where can she have gone? Did she feel that it was impossible to live? Did she go to her death,--or to hide and wait for him?"

"If you mean Lawrence, that's all nonsense," said Lyon, calmly. "I may tell you now--there were reasons why I couldn't before--that Lawrence is deeply in love with Miss Wolcott, who lives next door, and she returns his sentiment. I am satisfied that their formal engagement will be announced as soon as he is cleared of this accusation."

"What of that?" said Broughton dully. "He may be playing with a dozen women for all I know."

"He isn't that sort."

"He is the sort that keeps up a secret correspondence with another man's wife, and lures her from her home and her husband. That I know, and knowing that I can't believe very much good of him in other ways. He knows where my wife is now."

"I don't believe it."

"Well, he will know before I do," said Broughton, sullenly. "She has fled because she was connected with that affair in some way. It is even possible that she discovered I was watching. And if she hasn't destroyed herself, she has gone where she can wait for him."

Lyon felt helpless. The unreason of jealousy comes so near to insanity that argument and common sense are helpless before it. It can only be mastered by authority or by an appeal to the emotions, and Lyon did not feel himself in position to offer either to a man of Woods Broughton's age and personal force.

"Well, good night," he said lamely. "I'm going to bed."

"Go," said Broughton. "There is no reason why you should not sleep. I shall not sleep until I know where she is. Good God, this very minute she may be a helpless prisoner in some terrible den of infamy. She may be suffering,--though she cannot suffer as I do."

Lyon got away from him and went up to the little back bedroom which had come to seem so homelike in the short week he had been there. Kittie's curtains were both down--of course. Her faithfulness to their code even to this disastrous end struck him as pathetic.

"Dear little girl," he murmured, and blew a kiss across the night to her. One can venture so much more in the night than in the unsympathetic blaze of common day.

How much farther he might have gone on his excursion into sentiment can only be guessed, for just then his eye was caught and his mind diverted by something which, in a moment, took on more than a momentary importance. It was nothing more portentous than a lighted window in Miss Wolcott's home. The curious thing about it was that he had never seen a light in that second-story window before. Every evening when he had looked for Kittie's signal. Miss Wolcott's house had presented a perfectly blank and unobservant side to his view. Now some one was occupying a room which corresponded with his own room in this neighboring house. While his eye lingered on the light in idle speculation, he saw and distinctly recognized Miss Wolcott as she passed between the window and the light in the room. The sight was not in itself startling and yet he started and metaphorically rubbed his eyes. Miss Wolcott wore a hat. Instinctively he looked at his watch. It lacked a few minutes of eleven. Eleven o'clock in Waynscott was an hour when respectable householders went to bed, unless they went on a journey. Was it possible that Miss Wolcott was going out, alone and unattended, at this hour? He had the greatest confidence in the innocence of her intentions, whatever they were, but the story which she had told had not given him the same prejudice in favor of her discretion. What foolish plan might she have in her mind now? Why had she said nothing of her intention when he left her an hour ago? Distinctly worried, he reached for the overcoat and hat which he had thrown down on a chair in his room, and then went back to the window. If she was really bent on a midnight errand, he would escort her, whether she liked it or not. He would quietly watch for the moment of her departure, and then join her at her own front door.

But while he waited, another head crossed the lighted field of the window,--not Miss Wolcott's. She was not going alone, then, for this woman also wore a hat, and about her neck was the graceful line of an upturned fur collar. He did not know Miss Wolcott's friends,--he knew, indeed, very few women in Waynscott,--and yet something teasingly familiar about the lift of the head, the turn of the neck, puzzled him. Did he know her?

And then suddenly, the solution of it all flashed upon him. That delicately turned head belonged to Mrs. Broughton. Dolt, idiot, that he was, not to have reasoned it out before!