told with her. Even in the old days, as an intent grave-
eyed girl, she had seldom misplaced her light strokes; and
Darrow, on meeting her again, had immediately felt how much
finer and surer an instrument of expression she had become.

Their evening together had been a long confirmation of this
feeling. She had talked to him, shyly yet frankly, of what
had happened to her during the years when they had so
strangely failed to meet. She had told him of her marriage
to Fraser Leath, and of her subsequent life in France, where
her husband's mother, left a widow in his youth, had been
re-married to the Marquis de Chantelle, and where, partly in
consequence of this second union, the son had permanently
settled himself. She had spoken also, with an intense
eagerness of affection, of her little girl Effie, who was
now nine years old, and, in a strain hardly less tender, of
Owen Leath, the charming clever young stepson whom her
husband's death had left to her care...


A porter, stumbling against Darrow's bags, roused him to the
fact that he still obstructed the platform, inert and
encumbering as his luggage.

"Crossing, sir?"

Was he crossing? He really didn't know; but for lack of any
more compelling impulse he followed the porter to the
luggage van, singled out his property, and turned to march
behind it down the gang-way. As the fierce wind shouldered