a child. And as, in the plumed starred crowd, she had stood out
for him, slender, secluded and different, so he had felt, the instant
their glances met, that he as sharply detached himself for her. All that
and more her smile had said; had said not merely "I remember," but "I
remember just what you remember"; almost, indeed, as though her memory
had aided his, her glance flung back on their recaptured moment its
morning brightness. Certainly, when their distracted Ambassadress--with
the cry: "Oh, you know Mrs. Leath? That's perfect, for General Farnham
has failed me"--had waved them together for the march to the dining-room,
Darrow had felt a slight pressure of the arm on his, a pressure faintly
but unmistakably emphasizing the exclamation: "Isn't it wonderful?--In
London--in the season--in a mob?"

Little enough, on the part of most women; but it was a sign of Mrs.
Leath's quality that every movement, every syllable, told with her. Even
in the old days, as an intent grave-eyed girl, she had seldom misplaced
her light strokes; and Darrow, on meeting her again, had immediately
felt how much finer and surer an instrument of expression she had
become.

Their evening together had been a long confirmation of this feeling. She
had talked to him, shyly yet frankly, of what had happened to her during
the years when they had so strangely failed to meet. She had told him
of her marriage to Fraser Leath, and of her subsequent life in France,
where her husband's mother, left a widow in his youth, had been
re-married to the Marquis de Chantelle, and where, partly in consequence
of this second union, the son had permanently settled himself. She had
spoken also, with an intense eagerness of affection, of her little girl
Effie, who was now nine years old, and, in a strain hardly less tender,
of Owen Leath, the charming clever young stepson whom her husband's
death had left to her care...

A porter, stumbling against Darrow's bags, roused him to the fact that
he still obstructed the platform, inert and encumbering as his luggage.

"Crossing, sir?"

Was he crossing? He really didn't know; but for lack of any more
compelling impulse he followed the porter to the luggage van, singled
out his property, and turned to march behind it down the gang-way. As
the fierce wind shouldered him, building up a crystal wall against his
efforts, he felt anew the derision of his case.

"Nasty weather to cross, sir," the porter threw back at him as