that Laura would start alone and arrive alone. Or was she in the plot?
Had Mason simply arranged the whole "mistake," jumped into the same train
with her, and confronted her at the junction?

Helbeck moved blindly up and down the room, traversed by one of those
storms of excitement to which the men of his stock were liable. The
thought of those two figures leaving the Braeside station together at
midnight roused in him a madness half jealousy, half pride. He saw the
dainty head, the cloud of gold under the hat, the pretty gait, the
girlish waist, all the points of delicacy or charm he had worshipped
through his pain these many weeks. To think of them in the mere
neighbourhood of that coarse and sensual lad had always been profanation.
And now who would not be free to talk, to spatter her girlish name? The
sheer unseemliness of such a kinship!--such a juxtaposition.

If he could only know the true reason of that persistency she had shown
about the expedition, in the face of Augustina's wailings, and his own
silence? She had been dull--Heaven knows she had been dull at Bannisdale,
for these two months. On every occasion of his return from those
intermediate absences to which he had forced himself, he had perceived
that she drooped, that she was dumbly at war with the barriers that shut
her youth away from change and laughter, and the natural amusements,
flatteries and courtings that wait, or should wait, on sweet-and-twenty.
More than once he had realised the fever pulsing through the girl's
unrest. Of course she was dissatisfied and starved. She was not of the
sort that accepts the _role_ of companion or sick nurse without a murmur.
What could he do--he, into whose being she had crept with torturing
power--he who could not marry her even if she should cease to hate
him--who could only helplessly put land and distance between them? And
then, who knows what a girl plans, to what she will stoop, out of the