ind my rope and tug it, never fear.
Half way round the world perhaps some day you will feel me tugging."

"I shall feel you're there," he said, "whether you tug or not...."

"Three miles left to Exeter," he reported presently.

She glanced back at Belinda.

"It is good that we have loved, my dear," she whispered. "Say it is
good."

"The best thing in all my life," he said, and lowered his head and voice
to say: "My dearest dear."

"Heart's desire--still--?"

"Heart's delight.... Priestess of life.... Divinity."

She smiled and nodded and suddenly Belinda, up above their lowered
heads, accidentally and irrelevantly, no doubt, coughed.

At Exeter Station there was not very much time to spare after all.
Hardly had Sir Richmond secured a luncheon basket for the two travellers
before the train came into the station. He parted from Miss Grammont
with a hand clasp. Belinda was flushed and distressed at the last
but her friend was quiet and still. "Au revoir," said Belinda without
conviction when Sir Richmond shook her hand.

Section 8.

Sir Richmond stood quite still on the platform as the train ran out of
the station. He did not move until it had disappeared round the bend.
Then he turned, lost in a brown study, and walked very slowly towards
the station exit.

"The most wonderful thing in my life," he thought. "And already--it is
unreal.

"She will go on to her father whom she knows ten thousand times more
thoroughly than she knows me; she will go on to Paris, she will pick up
all the threads of her old story, be reminded of endless things in her
life, but never except in the most casual way of these days: they will
be cut off from everything else that will serve to keep them real; and
as for me--this connects with nothing else in my life at all.... It is
as disconnected as a dream.... Already it is hardly more substantial
than a dream....

"We shall write letters. Do letters breathe faster or slower as you read
them?

"We may meet.

"Where are we likely to meet again?... I never realized before how
improbable it is that we shall meet again. And if we meet?...

"Never in all our lives shall we be really TOGETHER again. It's
over--With a completeness....

"Like death."

He came opposite the bookstalls and stopped short and stared with
unseeing eyes at the display of popular literature. He was wondering now
whether after all he ought to have let her go. He experienced something
of the blank amazement