He came up the stairs three steps at a time.
"Hugh," she said, leaning heavily on the balustrade, and looking away, "I have a secret to tell you. I have tried to be wicked to-day, but somehow I can't. Listen to the truth."
"I need not," he answered. "I know it already."
Then she looked at him, and drew in her breath: "You know it?"
There was a ring at the hall door. The footman opened it, held a short parley with some one who was invisible, shut the door, and came upstairs with a card.
Mrs Glinn took it, and read, "Lord Herbert Manning."
He had decided to be unconventional too late.
The door of the long, dreary room, with its mahogany chairs, its littered table, its motley crew of pale, silent people, opened noiselessly. A dreary, lean footman appeared in the aperture, bowing towards a corner where, in a recess near a forlorn, lofty window, sat a tall, athletic-looking man of about forty-five years of age, with a strong yet refined face, clean shaven, and short, crisp, dark hair. The tall man rose immediately, laying down an old number of _Punch_, and made his way out, watched rather wolfishly by the other occupants of the room. The door closed upon him, and there was a slight rustle and a hiss of whispering.
Two well-dressed women leaned to one another, the feathers in their hats almost mingling as they murmured: "Not much the matter with him, I should fancy."
"He looks as strong as a horse; but modern men are always imagining themselves ill. He has lived too much, probably."
At the end of the room near the door, under the big picture of a grave man in a frock-coat, holding a double eye-glass tentatively in his right hand as if to emphasise an argument--a young girl bent towards her father, who said to her in a low voice:
"That man who has just left the room is Brune, the great sculptor."
Then a silence fell again, broken only by the rustle of turned pages and the occasional uneasy shifting of feet.
Meanwhile, in a small room across the hall, by a window through which the autumn sun streamed with a tepid brightness, Reginald Brune lay on a narrow sofa. His coat and waistcoat were thrown open; his chest was bared. Gerard Fane, the great discoverer of hidden diseases, raised himself from a bent posture, and spoke some words in a clear, even voice.