her
cushioned corner of the railway carriage, she was inwardly offering up
gentle, pathetically ardent prayers of gratitude. She was the woman who
prays, and the many sad petitions of the past years were being answered
at last. She was being allowed to go to Rosy--whatsoever happened, she
could never be really parted from her girl again. She asked pardon many
times because she had not been able to be really sorry when she had
heard of her son-in-law's desperate condition. She could feel pity for
him in his awful case, she told herself, but she could not wish for the
thing which perhaps she ought to wish for. She had confided this to her
husband with innocent, penitent tears, and he had stroked her cheek,
which had always been his comforting way since they had been young
things together.

"My dear," he said, "if a tiger with hydrophobia were loose among a lot
of decent people--or indecent ones, for the matter of that--you would
not feel it your duty to be very sorry if, in springing on a group of
them, he impaled himself on an iron fence. Don't reproach yourself too
much." And, though the realism of the picture he presented was such as
to make her exclaim, "No! No!" there were still occasional moments when
she breathed a request for pardon if she was hard of heart--this softest
of creatures human.

It was arranged by the two who best knew and loved her that her meeting
with Rosalie should have no spectators, and that their first hour
together should be wholly unbroken in upon.

"You have not seen each other for so long," Betty said, when, on her
arrival, she led her at once to the morning-room where Rosy waited,
pale with joy, but when the door was opened, though the two figures were
swept into each other's arms by one wild, tremulous rush of movement,
there were no sounds to be heard, only caught breaths, until the door
had closed again.

The talks which took place between Mr. Vanderpoel and Lord Mount
Dunstan were many and long, and were of absorbing interest to both. Each
presented to the other a new world, and a type of which his previous
knowledge had been but incomplete.

"I wonder," Mr. Vanderpoel said, in the course of one of them, "if
my world appeals to you as yours appeals to me. Naturally, from your
standpoint, it scarcely seems probable. Perhaps the up-building of large
financial schemes presupposes a certain degree of imagination. I
am becoming a romantic New York man of business, and I revel in it.