other baggage?"

"No," Verrian answered, and he led the way out after the vanishing
driver. "Our chariot is back here in hiding, Miss--"

"Shirley," she said, and trailed before him through the door he opened.

He felt that he did not do it as a man of the world would have done it,
and in putting her into the ramshackle carryall he knew that he had not
the grace of the sort of man who does nothing else. But Miss Shirley
seemed to have grace enough, of a feeble and broken sort, for both, and
he resolved to supply his own lack with sincerity. He therefore set his
jaw firmly and made its upper angles jut sharply through his clean-shaven
cheeks. It was well that Miss Shirley had some beauty to spare, too, for
Verrian had scarcely enough for himself. Such distinction as he had was
from a sort of intellectual tenseness which showed rather in the gaunt
forms of his face than in the gray eyes, heavily lashed above and below,
and looking serious but dull with their rank, black brows. He was
chewing a cud of bitterness in the accusal he made himself of having
forced Miss Shirley to give her name; but with that interesting
personality at his side, under the same tattered and ill-scented Japanese
goat-skin, he could not refuse to be glad, with all his self-blame.

"I'm afraid it's rather a long drive-for you, Miss Shirley," he ventured,
with a glance at her face, which looked very little under her hat. "The
driver says it's five miles round through the marshes."

"Oh, I shall not mind," she said, courageously, if not cheerfully, and he
did not feel authorized further to recognize the fact that she was an
invalid, or at best a convalescent.