The striking house that is Lilith’s family home looks so pristine and lovely in the early spring sunshine that Bram hesitates. He is suddenly acutely aware of his own appearance. He is still dressed in borrowed evening clothes, in which he has slept, and has had neither wash nor shave. He attempts to tame his hair with his hand, straightens his jacket. He is on the point of approaching the house when a car rounds the corner of the square at some speed and pulls up outside the front door of Number One. Bram hangs back. He recognizes Louis Harcourt as he leaps from the car and bounds up the steps. His knock on the door is quickly answered, and the viscount goes inside. In less than a minute he reappears, and Lilith is with him. She is dressed in a simple pale gray jacket and skirt with a darker matching hat and gloves. She seems to hesitate before getting into the car, looking up at Louis, her face full of anguish. And as she does so, he takes her in his arms and holds her in a warm, tender embrace. When he at last lets her go Bram clearly sees him wipe a tear from her cheek, before Lilith steps into the waiting car, Louis taking his place beside her, and they speed away.

Bram reels backward as if he has been struck. For a moment he thinks the Dark Spirit has come to assail him again, but no. He knows that the shock that has forced the breath from his body, the pain that constricts his heart, is the grief of heartbreak.

Gone. She has gone from me!

Suddenly, he sees everything in a different light, the perspective shifted, the truth he was blind to before now revealed. Lilith had not broken off her engagement with the viscount because she still loved him. She had danced with him so closely at the ball, the two of them clearly deeply attached to each other. She had left the ball without a word of explanation to Bram, and then failed to meet him at the station. And now, now he had witnessed their continuing affection.

And it is Harcourt she has chosen to leave with, not me.

He stands for a moment, confusion and hurt muddling his mind, the agony of his loss sweeping over him like a storm-built wave, so that he has to grasp the garden railings to steady himself. Only when he is certain his legs will carry him does he begin his journey back to Bloomsbury.