the form and the face and the voice he
loved, and the temptation and the longing and the doubt. And he was tost
and driven about through the livelong night till, in utter weariness, he
fell on the floor and slept.

CHAPTER VII.

An Early Train and a Morning's Amusement.

It was still early when he awoke, weary, stiff, and unrefreshed, but
with a conviction in his mind that had grown plain and strong in the
mysterious way notions sometimes seem to gather force in hours of
unconsciousness, and surprise us with their mature vigor when we awake.
"I must go!" he kept muttering to himself; "I must go--go and think. I
dare do nothing now." He hastily packed a hand bag, wrote a note for
Eugene, asking that the rest of his luggage might be forwarded to an
address he would send, went quietly downstairs, and, finding the door
just opened, passed out unseen. He had three miles to walk to the
station, but his restless feet brought him there quickly, and he had
more than an hour to wait for the first train, at half-past eight. He
sat down on the platform and waited. His capacity for thought and
emotion seemed for the time exhausted. His thoughts wandered from one
trivial matter to another, always eluding his effort to fix them. He
found himself acutely studying the gang of laborers who were going by
train to their day's work, and wondering how many pipes each of their
carefully guarded matches would light, and what each carried in his
battered tin drinking-bottle, remembering with a dreary sort of
amusement that he had heard this same incurable littleness of thought
settled on men condemned to death. Still, it passed the time, and he was
surprised out of a sort of reverie by the clanging of the porter's
inharmonious bell.

At the same moment a phaeton was rapidly driven up to the door of the
station, and all the porters rushed to meet it.

"Label it all for London," he heard Eugene's voice say. "Four boxes, a
portmanteau, and a hat-box. No, I'm not going--this lady and gentleman."

Kate, Haddington, and Eugene came through the ticket-office on to the
platform. Stafford involuntarily shrank back.

"Just in time!" Eugene was saying; "though why the dickens you people
will start at such an hour, I don't know. Haddington, I suppose, always
must be in a hurry--never does for a rising man to admit he's got spare
time. But you, Kate! Its positively uncomplimentary!"

He spoke lightly, but there was a troubled look on his fa