ce of the woods and opened the long line of its dull
windows, he realized all that it had done for Frida. He understood
the abnegation and the tragedy of her life. She had been sacrificed,
not only to her father, but to her father's fetish, the property;
Coton Manor had to be kept up at all costs, and the cost had been
Frida's, it had been her mother's. The place had crushed and
consumed her spirit, as it swallowed up two-thirds of her material
inheritance; it had made the living woman as the dead. He remembered
how the house had been called her mother's monument, and how it had
become her own grave. Her soul had never lived there. And now that
she was gone it was as empty as the tomb from which the soul has
lifted the body at resurrection time.

And he, too, was set at liberty.

He left by the slow early train on Wednesday without waiting for the
afternoon express, his object being not so much to reach town as to
get away from Coton Manor. The Colonel accompanied him to the
station; and, to his infinite surprise and embarrassment, he found
Mrs. Fazakerly on the platform waiting to see him off.

He could think of nothing nice to say to her about her engagement,
not even when she took possession of him with a hand on his arm, led
him away to the far end of the platform, and gazed expectantly into
his face.

"You don't congratulate me, Mr. Durant."

"On what?" he asked moodily.

"On having done a good deed."

"A good deed?"

"Didn't I tell you there was nothing I wouldn't do for Frida
Tancred?"

Incomparable cunning! To set herself right in his eyes and her own,
she was trying to persuade him that she had accepted the Colonel for
his daughter's sake. A good deed! Well, whatever else she had done,
and whatever her motives may have been, the deed remained; she had
set Frida Tancred free. Nevertheless, he could not be pleasant.

"Self-sacrifice, no doubt, is a virtue," said he; "yet one draws the
line----"

"Does one?"

He felt a delicate pressure on his arm, the right touch, the light
touch. "Mr. Durant, you are dense, and you are ungrateful."

"I don't see it."

"Don't you see what I have done for you?" There was a strange light
behind the _pince-nez_ as she smiled up into his face. "I have
cleared the way."

"For Miss Tancred, you mean," said Durant; thereby proving that in
her calculations as to his mean density Mrs. Fazakerly was not
altogether wrong.

But Durant was always an imaginative man. An