en quite an easy
matter to compass, for he desired to avoid above all any appearance of
secrecy.

But he need not have felt any anxiety, for whereas in an English
railway-station his large "tip" to the guard, carrying with it
significant promise of final largesse, would have spelt but one thing,
and that thing love, the French railway employe accepted without
question the information that the lady the foreign gentleman was
expecting was his sister. Such a statement to the English mind would
have suggested the hero of an innocent elopement, but as regards family
relations the French are curiously Eastern, and then it may be said
again that the American's stern, pre-occupied face and cold manner were
not those which to a Parisian could suggest a happy lover.

As he walked up and down with long, even strides, his arms laden with
papers and novels, it would have been difficult for anyone seeing him
there to suppose that Vanderlyn was starting on anything but a solitary
journey. Indeed, for the moment he felt horribly alone. He began to
experience the need of human companionship. She had said she would be
there at seven; it was now a quarter-past the hour. In ten minutes the
train would be gone----

Then came to him a thought which made him unconsciously clench his
hands. Was it not possible, nay, even likely, that Margaret Pargeter,
like many another woman before her, had found her courage fail her at
the last moment--that Heaven, stooping to her feeble virtue, had come to
save her in spite of herself?

Vanderlyn's steps unconsciously quickened. They bore him on and on, to
the extreme end of the platform. He stood there a moment staring out
into the red-starred darkness: how could he have ever thought that
Margaret Pargeter--his timid, scrupulous little Peggy--would embark on
so high and dangerous an adventure?

There had been a moment, during that springtime of passion which returns
no more, when Vanderlyn had for a wild instant hoped that he would be
able to take her away from the life in which he had felt her to be
playing the terrible role of an innocent and yet degraded victim.

Even to an old-fashioned American the word divorce does not carry with
it the odious significance it bears to the most careless Englishwoman.
He had envisaged a short scandal, and then his and Peggy's marriage. But
he had been compelled, almost at once, to recognise that with her any
such solution was impossible.

As to another alterna