as far as
Oxford; after that his ideas were vague.

He was a little daunted by the thought of Lady Dawn. Everything that he
had heard about her, including his first meeting with her, had served to
daunt him. He pictured her as a woman with a conscience clear-cut as a
cameo--a woman, infallible and unsubdued, impatient of foolishness and
gentle in her spirit with the cold tranquillity of a landscape under
ice. How would she receive him, coming out of nowhere, unheralded and
unexplained? And how could he explain the urgency that had compelled him
to come to her? It was a delicate task that he had set himself, this
seeking out a woman with whom he was unacquainted, that he might tell
her that her husband had not hated her when he died. What concern was it
of his, she might well ask. If she chose to be hostile, there were no
arguments by which he could defend his interference. His sole
justification was his deep-rooted conviction that he was doing right.

She never cried. How often Maisie had insisted on her sister's
abstinence from tears, as though it was something monstrous that summed
up all her character! He would have felt far more comfortable in
visiting her if he had been assured that she sometimes cried.

As he turned into Brompton Square, he thought he caught the door of his
house in the act of closing. He might have been mistaken. It was dark
under the shadow of the trees. Quite possibly it had been the door of a
neighbor's house. Nevertheless, he hugged the curb as he drove so that
he might scan the face of any one on the pavement. Forty yards from his
doorstep, at a point where things were darkest, a man passed him. He was
a tall man and walked with the erectness of one who had been a soldier.
The way in which he carried himself and strode was extraordinarily
reminiscent. Tabs slowed down and looked back; the man moved straight
ahead, without hesitancy or sign of recognition. It couldn't be
Braithwaite; Ann's vicinity was the least likely place in which to find
him.

As Tabs let himself into his house, he found Ann in the hall. "Was there
some one here to see me?" he asked.

"There's been no one to see your Lordship," Ann replied respectfully.

He scarcely knew what prompted him to say it. Perhaps it was the
healthy neatness of her appearance--the extreme orderliness of her
quiet. "Ann, you're the sanest creature I meet anywhere. You've the
pluck of one in a million."

She turned to him a face that was f