airs, where Catherine, believing him safely captive for
the morning, was going through some household business.

'I _must_ go, I _must_ go!' he said as he handed her the letter.
'Meyrick puts it cautiously, but it may be the end!'

Catherine looked at him in despair.

'Robert, you are like a ghost yourself, and I have sent for Dr.
Edmondson.'

'Put him off till the day after to-morrow. Dear little wife, listen; my
voice is ever so much better. Murewell air will do me good.' She turned
away to hide the tears in her eyes. Then she tried fresh persuasions,
but it was useless. His look was glowing and restless. She saw he felt
it a call impossible to disobey. A telegram was sent to Edmondson, and
Robert drove off to Waterloo.

Out of the fog of London it was a mild, sunny winter's day. Robert
breathed more freely with every mile. His eyes took note of every
landmark in the familiar journey with a thirsty eagerness. It was a year
and a half since he had travelled it. He forgot his weakness, the
exhausting pressure and publicity of his new work. The past possessed
him, thrust out the present. Surely he had been up to London for the day
and was going back to Catherine!

At the station he hailed an old friend among the cabmen.

'Take me to the corner of the Murewell lane, Tom. Then you may drive on
my bag to the Hall, and I shall walk over the common.'

The man urged on his tottering old steed with a will. In the streets of
the little town Robert saw several acquaintances who stopped and stared
at the apparition. Were the houses, the people real, or was it all a
hallucination--his flight and his return, so unthought of yesterday, so
easy and swift to-day?

By the time they were out on the wild ground between the market town and
Murewell, Robert's spirits were as buoyant as thistle-down. He and the
driver kept up an incessant gossip over the neighbourhood, and he
jumped down from the carriage as the man stopped with the alacrity of a
boy.

'Go on, Tom; see if I am not there as soon as you.'

'Looks most uncommon bad,' the man muttered to himself as his horse
shambled off. 'Seems as spry as a lark all the same.'

Why, the gorse was out, positively out in January! and the thrushes were
singing as though it were March. Robert stopped opposite a bush covered
with timid half-opened blooms, and thought he had seen nothing so
beautiful since he had last trodden that road in spring. Presently he
was in the same cart-track