vour, and suddenly, for
no apparent reason, stop short in the middle of a sentence, and refuse
to speak again. Excitement, reserve, tenderness, and sarcasm, followed
each other in rapid sequence, and added not a little to the strain of
the waiting days, but Katrine bore patiently with the varying moods,
realising that to a woman of intensely practical nature the very fact of
having opened her heart in the hour of danger would be enough to close
it more tightly than ever when that danger was past. "If we get out of
this, your work is to forget!" Those had been Mrs Mannering's own
words, but, poor dear soul! she herself was evidently finding the task
difficult, lashing herself for her ill-placed confidence! Moreover, she
also had a meeting in store... Every time that Katrine's reflections
brought her round to this point, Mrs Mannering and her idiosyncrasies
were forgotten in the whirl of her own thoughts. So far as was possible
she tried to shut her mind to what lay ahead, to encourage, rather than
fight against, the languor of mind and body which gave a dream-like
unreality to life. As Jim Blair had said, this time was a rest by the
way, a No-man's land, when her chief duty was to rest and gather
strength.

On the third day the two ladies started on their three days' journey up
country, under the most luxurious conditions which it was possible to
attain. Everything had been thought of, everything arranged; agent and
officials waited upon them with an assiduity which the older traveller,
at least, had no difficulty in tracing to its source. Short of climatic
exigencies the long journey was robbed of discomfort, but the length,
the heat, above all the dust, made it nevertheless a trying experience
to the English girl.

At first the novelty of the country arrested her attention, but long
before the four days were over, interest had evaporated, and she was
consumed by alternate longings to reach her destination, and a panic of
dread at what awaited her when there. How incomprehensible to be
dreading a destination which meant Dorothea, and the fulfilment of a
lifelong dream! How still more incomprehensible to find it an effort to
think of Dorothea at all!

After what seemed an eternity of waiting, the journey came to an end.
The train drew up before a little sun-baked station which was like a
score of others that had been passed before, and on the platform stood a
man in uniform, and a woman in white whose thin,