f that of what it would symbolize she
was content to know nothing more than just what her having it would tell
her. At bottom she inclined to the Maltese cross--with the added reason
that he had named it. But she would look again and judge afresh; she
would on the spot so handle and ponder that there shouldn't be the shade
of a mistake.

Before Christmas she had a natural opportunity to go to London; there
was her periodical call upon her father to pay as well as a promise to
Maggie to redeem. She spent her first night in West Kensington, with the
idea of carrying out on the morrow the purpose that had most of a
motive. Her father's affection was not inquisitive, but when she
mentioned to him that she had business in the country that would oblige
her to catch an early train, he deprecated her excursion in view of the
menace of the weather. It was spoiling for a storm; all the signs of a
winter gale were in the air. She replied that she would see what the
morning might bring; and it brought, in fact, what seemed in London an
amendment. She was to go to Maggie the next day, and now that she had
started her eagerness had become suddenly a pain. She pictured her
return that evening with her trophy under her cloak; so that after
looking, from the doorstep, up and down the dark street, she decided,
with a new nervousness, and sallied forth to the nearest place of access
to the "Underground." The December dawn was dolorous, but there was
neither rain nor snow; it was not even cold, and the atmosphere of West
Kensington, purified by the wind, was like a dirty old coat that had
been bettered by a dirty brush. At the end of almost an hour, in the
larger station, she had taken her place in a third-class compartment;
the prospect before her was the run of eighty minutes to Poynton. The
train was a fast one, and she was familiar with the moderate measure of
the walk to the park from the spot at which it would drop her.

Once in the country, indeed, she saw that her father was right: the
breath of December was abroad with a force from which the London
labyrinth had protected her. The green fields were black, the sky was
all alive with the wind; she had, in her anxious sense of the elements,
her wonder at what might happen, a reminder of the surmises, in the old
days of going to the Continent, that used to worry her on the way, at
night, to the horrid cheap crossings by long sea. Something, in a dire
degree, at this last hour, had be