ly tinted face. By and by he looked
at her.

"It's curious that I had your photograph ever so long, and never thought
of showing it to Gregory," he observed.

Agatha smiled. "I suppose it is," she admitted. "After all, except that
it might have been a relief to Major Radcliffe if he had met you sooner,
the fact that you didn't show it to Gregory doesn't seem of any
particular consequence."

Wyllard was not quite sure of this. He had thought about this girl
often, and certainly had been conscious of a curious thrill of
satisfaction when he had met her at the stepping-stones. That feeling
had suddenly disappeared when he had learned that she was his comrade's
promised wife. He had, however, during the last hour or two made up his
mind to think no more of her.

"Well," he declared, "the next thing is to arrange for Mrs. Hastings to
meet you in London, or, perhaps, at the Grange. Her husband is a
Canadian, a man of education, who has quite a large homestead not far
from Gregory's. Her relatives are people of station in Montreal, and I
feel sure that you'll like her."

They decided that he was to ask Mrs. Hastings to stay a few days at the
Grange, and then he looked at the girl somewhat diffidently.

"She suggests going in a fortnight," he said.

Agatha smiled at him. "Then," she said, "I must not keep her waiting."

She rose and they went back together to join their hostess.

CHAPTER VIII

THE TRAVELING COMPANION

A gray haze, thickened by the smoke of the city, drove out across the
water when the _Scarrowmania_ lay in the Mersey, with her cable hove
short, and the last of the flood-tide gurgling against her bows. A
trumpeting blast of steam swept high aloft from beside her squat funnel,
and the splash of the slowly turning paddles of the two steam tugs that
lay alongside mingled with the din it made. A gangway from one of them
to the _Scarrowmania's_ forward deck, and a stream of frowsy humanity
that had just been released from overpacked emigrant boarding-houses
poured up it. There were apparently representatives of all peoples and
languages among that unkempt horde--Britons, Scandinavians, Teutons,
Italians, Russians, Poles--and they moved on in forlorn apathy, like
cattle driven to the slaughter. One wondered how they had raised their
passage money, and how many years' bitter self-denial it had cost them
to provide for their transit to the land of promise.

At the head of the gangway stood the ste