d her? The thought drove everything else
out of his mind. Vera, her father, his sisters, all seemed to belong to
some distant past with which he now had no connection. His bitterness
against Ida and May, his anger against the canon, his first feeling of
grief, or rather of wounded pride, when he learnt that Vera was lost to
him--these were as nothing compared to the fear that Lalage would refuse
him. He was like a man who had awakened from a long sleep full of
dreams to find that, whilst he had slumbered, a deadly peril had come
down on him, a peril which could be averted only by immediate action.

Jimmy had ordered a drink, more or less mechanically, as a tribute
levied by the house; but he pushed it away untasted.

"I'm going to be absolutely sober when I do this," he muttered, then
went back into the hall, where he spent five minutes poring over a
timetable, following the trains down the lines of figures with a finger
which trembled slightly. Every hour seemed of supreme importance now.
Had he not been in dreamland for over a year? At last he found his
trains. He had three hours to wait in the town, two hours in London; but
he would finally arrive in the little Yorkshire town about half-past
seven in the morning, before Lalage had started work in that hateful
little shop.

There was no need for him to write the trains down. Their times of
departure were already graven on his memory; all he had to do now was
cross the road to the post-office and wire to Lalage. He was cool again,
a perfectly normal man. All his anger and his excitement had gone; but,
none the less, he did not hesitate a moment over taking what might be,
what he hoped would be, an irrevocable step.

An hour later, the kindly, grey-bearded old draper beckoned Lalage into
his private office. "There's a wire for you, Miss Penrose," he said.

Lalage opened the envelope with trembling fingers--only one person in
the world would wire to her--then she swayed a little and gripped the
table for support, as she read, "Meet me at the station half-past seven
to-morrow morning. Jimmy."

The draper was watching her anxiously. "No bad news, I hope," he said.

She looked at him with a smile which reassured him instantly. "No, it's
good news, the best of good news," she answered.

When she had gone out the old man shook his head sadly. His own wife had
died thirty years before, and he had passed nearly half of his life in
waiting for the meeting on the other si