s mystified."

"How droll!" she laughed sweetly, "and how amusing and all the more
beautiful and like you, to be, in spite of yourself, here. You see we
have switched off--just as you said we would do."

So they had indeed: they had stopped, and the fact fetched him to his
feet. He looked out: it was a fast express, a through train--the first
stop should have been Westboro' Abbey.

"Yes, we're switched off!" she cried delightedly, "as you know: as you
arranged so cleverly!--and the Westboro' people will go on without us."

Would they indeed! Lucky people, but not if he could prevent it. But
his attention to the train's procedure had come too late.

He opened the window and looked out. They stood at the side of a
switch some three hundred yards above a small squat station, and in the
far distance Bulstrode could see the end of a disappearing train. He
drew in his head and quietly asked his companion:

"What has happened to us, do you know?"

She laughed deliciously. "Know? Why, of course, I do. You're
delightful! Of course I have followed every step of the plan--the
special for Dover picks us up here in three-quarters of an hour,
doesn't it? We make the boat for Calais, and there Gela meets me and
_your_ mission is done!"

The gentleman opposite her listened quietly, and before speaking waited
a second, staring down at her, his hands in his pockets: there they
touched a little coin which he always carried: a coin that opened at a
sacred point to discover to his eyes alone a picture of a woman as
lovely as this woman, as human, and one whom he had good cause to
suppose loved another man than her husband. The woman opposite him was
escaping from her husband. _That_ was what she was doing! He who had
striven for fifteen years to prevent the like in the life of the one
woman of all, now appeared to be helping this poor thing to the same
thing. He did not believe he was to be waylaid and robbed, or that any
trick had been played upon him. The only thing he did _not_ believe
was that the woman knew him! Before, however, brushing the delusion
aside, he asked, his candid eyes upon her: "And my mission being so
done, what then becomes of you?"

The shrug of her shoulders was neither an indication of indifference
nor a pretty desperation! it rather was a relinquishing of herself
wholly to Fate--an abandon.

"What becomes of a happy woman who goes with the man she loves?"

"Her Fate," said her companio