--to Vanderlyn they had seemed an
hour--had come to an end. At last the train began to move, that slow and
yet relentless movement which is one of the few things in our modern
world which spell finality. To the man and the woman it was the starting
of the train which indicated to them both that the die was indeed cast.

Vanderlyn looked at his companion. She was gazing up at him with a
strange expression of gladness, of relief, on her face. The long years
of restraint and measured coldness seemed to have vanished, receded into
nothingness.

She held out her ringless hand and clasped his, and a moment later they
were sitting hand in hand, like two children, side by side. With a
rather awkward movement he slipped on her finger a thin gold ring--his
dead mother's wedding-ring,--but still she said nothing. Her head was
turned away, and she was staring out of the window, as if fascinated by
the flying lights. He knew rather than saw that her eyes were shining,
her cheeks pink with excitement; then she took off her hat, and he told
himself that her fair hair gleaming against the grey-brown furnishings
of the railway carriage looked like a golden aureole.

Suddenly Laurence Vanderlyn pressed the hand he was holding to his lips,
dropped it, and then stood up. He pulled the blue silk shade over the
electric light globe which hung in the centre of the carriage; glanced
through one of the two tiny glazed apertures giving a view of the next
compartment; then he sat down by her, and in the half darkness gathered
her into his arms.

"Dear," he said, in a voice that sounded strange and muffled even to
himself, "do you remember the passage at Bonnington?"

As he held her, she had been looking up into his face, but now, hearing
his question, she flushed deeply, and her head fell forward on his
breast. Their minds, their hearts, were travelling back to the moment,
to the trifling episode, which had revealed to each the other's love.

It had happened ten years ago, at a time when Tom Pargeter, desiring to
play the role of country gentleman, had taken for awhile a certain
historic country house. There, he and his young wife had brought
together a great Christmas house-party composed of the odd, ill-assorted
social elements which gather at the call of the wealthy host who has
exchanged old friends for new acquaintances. Peggy's own people,
old-fashioned country gentry, were regarded by Pargeter as hopelessly
dowdy and "out of it," so