lmost
hope that the woman for whom he was waiting would not come after all.

He cursed himself for a fool. Why had he not thought of driving her out
to one of the smaller stations on the line whence they could have
started, if not unseen, then unobserved?

But soon the slowly-growing suspicion that she, after all, was perhaps
not coming to-night, brought with it an agonising pang. Very suddenly
there occurred to him the horrible possibility of material accident.
Mrs. Pargeter was not used even to innocent adventure; she lived the
guarded, sheltered existence which belongs of right to those women whose
material good fortune all their less fortunate sisters envy. The dangers
of the Paris streets rose up before Vanderlyn's excited imagination,
hideous, formidable....

Then, quite suddenly, Margaret Pargeter herself stood before him,
smiling a little tremulously.

She was wearing a grey, rather austere tailor-made gown; it gave a
girlish turn to her slender figure, and on her fair hair was poised the
little boat-shaped hat and long silvery gauze veil which have become in
a sense the uniform of a well-dressed Parisienne on her travels.

As he looked at her, standing there by his side, Vanderlyn realised how
instinctively tender, how passionately protective, was his love for her;
and again there came over him the doubt, the questioning, as to why she
was doing this....

"Messieurs, mesdames, en voiture, s'il vous plait! En voiture, s'il vous
plait!"

He put his hand on her shoulder--her head was very little higher than
his heart--and guided her to the railway carriage which had been kept
for them.

II.

And now Laurence Vanderlyn and Margaret Pargeter were speeding through
the night, completely and physically alone as they had never been during
the years of their long acquaintanceship; and, as he sat there, with the
woman he had loved so long and so faithfully wholly in his power, there
came over Vanderlyn a sense of fierce triumph and conquest.

The train had not started to time. There had come a sound of eager
talking on the platform, and Vanderlyn, filled with a vague
apprehension, had leaned out of the window and with some difficulty
ascertained the cause of the delay. The guard in charge of the train,
the man, that is, whom he had feed so well in order to secure privacy,
had strained his hand in lifting a weight, and another employe had had
to take his place.

But at last the few moments of waiting