fixed on the landscape. She had been
afraid that the old woman would talk to her, perhaps offer her
refreshments, or sympathy; for she was a kind old woman, with bland eyes
and a moist warm face and two oily curls hanging forward from her
old-fashioned bonnet upon her shoulders. She was stout, dressed in tight
black cashmere, and she sat with her knees apart and her hands, gloved
in grey thread gloves, lying on them. She held a handkerchief rolled
into a ball, and from time to time, as if furtively, she would raise
this handkerchief to her brow and wipe it. And all the time, Karen felt,
she looked mildly and humbly at her and seemed to divine her distress.

Karen was thankful when she got out. She had been ashamed of her
antipathy.

Bodmin Road was now passed and the early spring sunset shone over the
tree-tops in the valleys below. Karen leaned her head back and closed
her eyes. She was suddenly aware of her great fatigue, and when they
reached Gwinear Road she found that she had been dozing.

The fresh, chill air, as she walked along the platform, waiting for the
change of trains, revived her. She had not been able to eat her beef
sandwiches and the thought that so much of Frau Lippheim's good food
should be wasted troubled her; she was glad to find a little wandering
fox-terrier who ate the meat eagerly. She herself, sitting beside the
dog, nibbled at Franz's chocolate. She had had nothing on her journey
but the milk and part of the bun which Franz had given her.

Now she was in the little local train and the bleak Cornish country,
nearing the coast, spread before her eyes like a map of her future life.
She began to think of the future, and of Tante.

She had not sent word to Tante that she was coming. She felt that it
would be easiest to appear before her in silence and Tante would
understand. There need be no explanations.

She imagined that Tante would find it best that she should live,
permanently now, in Cornwall with Mrs. Talcott. It could hardly be
convenient for her to take about with her a wife who had left her
husband. Karen quite realized that her status must be a very different
one from that of the unshadowed young girl.

And it would be strange to take up the old life again and to look back
from it at the months of life with Gregory--that mirage of happiness
receding as if to a blur of light seen over a stretch of desert. Still
with her quiet and unrevealing young face turned towards the evening