l allow me."

"You are crossing to-night?" she said, vaguely. Her lips framed the
words with difficulty.

"Yes. I came over with my cousins yesterday."

She asked nothing more. It did not occur to her to notice that he had no
luggage, no bag, no rug, none of the paraphernalia of travel. In her
despairing fatigue and misery she let him guide her as he would.

He made her take some soup, then some coffee, all that she could make
herself swallow. There was a dismal period of waiting, during which she
was hardly conscious of where she was or of what was going on round her.

Then she found herself in the sleeping-car, in a reserved compartment,
alone. Once more the train moved through the night. The miles flew
by--the miles that forever parted her from Warkworth.

XIX

The train was speeding through the forest country of Chantilly. A pale
moon had risen, and beneath its light the straight forest roads,
interminably long, stretched into the distance; the vaporous masses of
young and budding trees hurried past the eye of the traveller; so, also,
the white hamlets, already dark and silent; the stations with their
lights and figures; the great wood-piles beside the line.

Delafield, in his second-class carriage, sat sleepless and erect. The
night was bitterly cold. He wore the light overcoat in which he had left
the Hotel du Rhin that afternoon for a stroll before dinner, and had no
other wrap or covering. But he felt nothing, was conscious of nothing
but the rushing current of his own thoughts.

The events of the two preceding days, the meaning of them, the
significance of his own action and its consequences--it was with these
materials that his mind dealt perpetually, combining, interpreting,
deducing, now in one way, now in another. His mood contained both
excitement and dread. But with a main temper of calmness, courage,
invincible determination, these elements did not at all interfere.

The day before, he had left London with his cousins, the Duke of
Chudleigh, and young Lord Elmira, the invalid boy. They were bound to
Paris to consult a new doctor, and Jacob had offered to convey them
there. In spite of all the apparatus of servants and couriers with which
they were surrounded, they always seemed to him, on their journeys, a
singularly lonely and hapless pair, and he knew that they leaned upon
him and prized his company.

On the way to Paris, at the Calais buffet, he had noticed Henry
Warkworth, and had gi