gun to press on her heart: it was the
sudden imagination of a disaster, or at least of a check, before her
errand was achieved. When she said to herself that something might
happen she wanted to go faster than the train. But nothing could happen
save a dismayed discovery that, by some altogether unlikely chance, the
master and mistress of the house had already come back. In that case she
must have had a warning, and the fear was but the excess of her hope. It
was every one's being exactly where every one was that lent the quality
to her visit. Beyond lands and seas and alienated forever, they in their
different ways gave her the impression to take as she had never taken
it. At last it was already there, though the darkness of the day had
deepened; they had whizzed past Chater--Chater, which was the station
before the right one. Off in that quarter was an air of wild rain, but
there shimmered straight across it a brightness that was the color of
the great interior she had been haunting. That vision settled before
her--in the house the house was all; and as the train drew up she rose,
in her mean compartment, quite proudly erect with the thought that all
for Fleda Vetch then the house was standing there.

But with the opening of the door she encountered a shock, though for an
instant she couldn't have named it; the next moment she saw it was given
her by the face of the man advancing to let her out, an old lame porter
of the station, who had been there in Mrs. Gereth's time and who now
recognized her. He looked up at her so hard that she took an alarm and
before alighting broke out to him: "They've come back?" She had a
confused, absurd sense that even he would know that in this case she
mustn't be there. He hesitated, and in the few seconds her alarm had
completely changed its ground: it seemed to leap, with her quick jump
from the carriage, to the ground that was that of his stare at her.
"Smoke?" She was on the platform with her frightened sniff: it had taken
her a minute to become aware of an extraordinary smell. The air was full
of it, and there were already heads at the window of the train, looking
out at something she couldn't see. Some one, the only other passenger,
had got out of another carriage, and the old porter hobbled off to close
his door. The smoke was in her eyes, but she saw the station-master,
from the end of the platform, recognize her too and come straight to
her. He brought her a finer shade of surpr