them to advertise in the remoter reaches of the family that
they had forfeited the confidence of the master of Poynton. The letters
lying at the club proved effectively that he was not in London, and this
was the question that immediately concerned them. Nothing could concern
them further till the answers to their telegrams should have had time to
arrive. Mrs. Gereth had got back into the cab, and, still at the door of
the club, they sat staring at their need of patience. Fleda's eyes
rested, in the great hard street, on passing figures that struck her as
puppets pulled by strings. After a little the driver challenged them
through the hole in the top. "Anywhere in particular, ladies?"

Fleda decided. "Drive to Euston, please."

"You won't wait for what we may hear?" Mrs. Gereth asked.

"Whatever we hear, I must go." As the cab went on she added: "But I
needn't drag _you_ to the station."

Mrs. Gereth was silent a moment; then "Nonsense!" she sharply replied.

In spite of this sharpness they were now almost equally and almost
tremulously mild; though their mildness took mainly the form of an
inevitable sense of nothing left to say. It was the unsaid that occupied
them--the thing that for more than an hour they had been going round and
round without naming it. Much too early for Fleda's train, they
encountered at the station a long half-hour to wait. Fleda made no
further allusion to Mrs. Gereth's leaving her; their dumbness, with the
elapsing minutes, grew to be in itself a reconstituted bond. They slowly
paced the great gray platform, and presently Mrs. Gereth took the girl's
arm and leaned on it with a hard demand for support. It seemed to Fleda
not difficult for each to know of what the other was thinking--to know
indeed that they had in common two alternating visions, one of which, at
moments, brought them as by a common impulse to a pause. This was the
one that was fixed; the other filled at times the whole space and then
was shouldered away. Owen and Mona glared together out of the gloom and
disappeared, but the replenishment of Poynton made a shining, steady
light. The old splendor was there again, the old things were in their
places. Our friends looked at them with an equal yearning; face to face,
on the platform, they counted them in each other's eyes. Fleda had come
back to them by a road as strange as the road they themselves had
followed. The wonder of their great journeys, the prodigy of this second
one,