In the light of the station electrics she beamed upon him, and he felt
glad at heart, as if he had been saved from something, a mortal danger
or a threatened shame. But he could not speak at once; his teeth closed
with tetanic force upon each other. Later, as they walked to the hotel,
through the warm, soft night in which the south wind was roaming the
starless heavens for rain, he found his voice, and although he felt that
he was speaking unnaturally, he made out to answer the lively questions
with which she pelted him too thickly to expect them to be answered
severally. She told him all the news of the day, and when she began on
yesterday's news she checked herself with a laugh and said she had
forgotten that he had only been gone since morning. "But now," she said,
"you see how you've been missed--how _any_ man must be missed in a hotel
full of women."

She took charge of him when they got to the house, and said if he would
go boldly into the dining-room, where they detected, as they approached,
one lamp scantly shining from the else darkened windows, she would beard
the lioness in her den, by which she meant the cook in the kitchen, and
see what she could get him for supper. Apparently she could get nothing
warm, for when a reluctant waitress appeared it was with such a chilly
refection on her tray that Alford, though he was not very hungry,
returned from interrogating the obscurity for eidolons, and shivered at
it. At the same time the swing-door of the long, dim room opened to
admit a gush of the outer radiance on which Mrs. Yarrow drifted in with
a chafing-dish in one hand and a tea-basket in the other. She floated
tiltingly towards him like, he thought, a pretty little ship, and sent a
cheery hail before.

"I've been trying to get somebody to join you at a premature
Welsh-rarebit and a belated cup of tea, but I can't tear one of the