et.

"Can she be one of us?" Miss Macroyd demanded, in a dramatic whisper.

"She might be anything," Verrian returned, trying instantly, with a whir
of his inventive machinery, to phrase her. He made a sort of luxurious
failure of it, and rested content with her face, which showed itself
now in profile and now fronted him in full, and now was restless and
now subsided in a look of delicate exhaustion. He would have said, if
he would have said anything absolute, that she was a person who had
something on her mind; at instants she had that hunted air, passing at
other instants into that air of escape. He discussed these appearances
with Miss Macroyd, but found her too frankly disputatious; and she
laughed too much and too loud.

VIII.

At Southfield, where they all descended, Miss Macroyd promptly possessed
herself of a groom, who came forward tentatively, touching his hat.
"Miss Macroyd?" she suggested.

"Yes, miss," the man said, and led the way round the station to the
victoria which, when Miss Macroyd's maid had mounted to the place beside
her, had no room; for any one else.

Verrian accounted for her activity upon the theory of her quite
justifiable wish not to arrive at Seasands with a young man whom she
might then have the effect of having voluntarily come all the way with;
and after one or two circuits of the station it was apparent to him that
he was not to have been sent for from Mrs. Westangle's, but to have been
left to the chances of the local drivers and their vehicles. These were
reduced to a single carryall and a frowsy horse whose rough winter coat
recalled the aspect of his species in the period following the glacial
epoch. The mud, as of a world-thaw, encrusted the wheels and curtains of
the carryall.

Verrian seized upon it and then went into the waiting-room, where he had
left his suit-case. He found the stranger there in parley with the young
woman in the ticket-office about a conveyance to Mrs. Westangle's. It
proved that he had secured not only the only thing of the sort, but
the only present hope of any other, and in the hard case he could not
hesitate with distress so interesting. It would have been brutal to
drive off and leave that girl there, and it would have been a vulgar
flourish to put the entire vehicle at her service. Besides, and perhaps
above all, Verrian had no idea of depriving himself of such a chance as
heaven seemed to offer him.

He advanced with the delicacy of t