nery.

Reading and the spring-tide beauties of the Thames valley had gone by in
the morning. Then, after the attendant had passed along the corridor
announcing lunch, and those who were lunching had followed him in single
file, had come the lonely majesty of the Somerset downs, lying like
great headlands along the plain, a vast sky of rippled blue and silver
above them. They had passed Plymouth where she had always used to look
down from the high bridges and wonder over the lives of the midshipmen
on the training-ships, and now they were winding through wooded Cornish
valleys.

Karen had looked out of her window all day. She had not read, though
kind Frau Lippheim had put the latest _tendenz-roman_, paper-bound, into
the little basket, which was also stocked with stout beef-sandwiches, a
bottle of milk, and the packet of chocolate and bun in paper bag that
Franz had added to it at the station.

Poor Franz. He and his mother had come to see her off and they had both
wept as the train moved away, and strange indeed it must have been for
them to see the Karen Jardine who, only yesterday, had been, apparently,
so happy, and so secure in her new life, carried back to the old; a wife
who had left her husband.

Karen had slept little the night before, and kind Franz must have slept
less; for he had given her his meagre bedroom and spent the night on the
narrowest, hardest, most slippery of sofas in the sitting-room of the
Bayswater lodging-house where Karen had found the Lippheims very
cheaply, very grimly, not to say greasily, installed. It was no wonder
that Franz's eyes had been so heavy, his face so puffed and pale that
morning; and his tears had given the last touch of desolation to his
countenance.

Karen herself had not wept, either at the parting or at the meeting of
the night before. She had told them, with no explanations at all, that
she had left her husband and was going back to her guardian, and the
Lippheims had asked no questions.

It might have been possible that Franz, as he sat at the table, his
fingers run through his hair, clutching his head while he and his mother
listened to her, was not so dazed and lost as was Frau Lippheim, who had
not seen Gregory. Franz might have his vague perceptions. "_Ach! Ach!_"
he had ejaculated once or twice while she spoke.

And Frau Lippheim had only said: "_Liebes Kind! Liebes, armes Kind!_"

She was, after all, going back to the great Tante and they felt, no
doub