he outside, by the recollection of her
purpose in coming there. She had come to find Ralph Denham. She hastily
turned back into Lincoln's Inn Fields, and looked for her landmark--the
light in the three tall windows. She sought in vain. The faces of the
houses had now merged in the general darkness, and she had difficulty in
determining which she sought. Ralph's three windows gave back on their
ghostly glass panels only a reflection of the gray and greenish sky. She
rang the bell, peremptorily, under the painted name of the firm. After
some delay she was answered by a caretaker, whose pail and brush of
themselves told her that the working day was over and the workers
gone. Nobody, save perhaps Mr. Grateley himself, was left, she assured
Katharine; every one else had been gone these ten minutes.

The news woke Katharine completely. Anxiety gained upon her. She
hastened back into Kingsway, looking at people who had miraculously
regained their solidity. She ran as far as the Tube station, overhauling
clerk after clerk, solicitor after solicitor. Not one of them even
faintly resembled Ralph Denham. More and more plainly did she see him;
and more and more did he seem to her unlike any one else. At the door of
the station she paused, and tried to collect her thoughts. He had gone
to her house. By taking a cab she could be there probably in advance of
him. But she pictured herself opening the drawing-room door, and William
and Cassandra looking up, and Ralph's entrance a moment later, and the
glances--the insinuations. No; she could not face it. She would write
him a letter and take it at once to his house. She bought paper and
pencil at the bookstall, and entered an A.B.C. shop, where, by ordering
a cup of coffee, she secured an empty table, and began at vice to write:

"I came to meet you and I have missed you. I could not face William and
Cassandra. They want us--" here she paused. "They insist that we are
engaged," she substituted, "and we couldn't talk at all, or explain
anything. I want--" Her wants were so vast, now that she was in
communication with Ralph, that the pencil was utterly inadequate to
conduct them on to the paper; it seemed as if the whole torrent of
Kingsway had to run down her pencil. She gazed intently at a notice
hanging on the gold-encrusted wall opposite, "... to say all kinds of
things," she added, writing each word with the painstaking of a child.
But, when she raised her eyes again to meditate the