lf
with impatience to see the back of his brother-in-law. How was it that
he had not got rid of Fyne long before in any case? I don't mean by
actually throwing him out of the window, but in some other resolute
manner.

Surely Fyne had not impressed him. That he was an impressionable man I
could not doubt. The presence of the girl there on the pavement before
me proved this up to the hilt--and, well, yes, touchingly enough.

It so happened that in their wanderings to and fro our glances met. They
met and remained in contact more familiar than a hand-clasp, more
communicative, more expressive. There was something comic too in the
whole situation, in the poor girl and myself waiting together on the
broad pavement at a corner public-house for the issue of Fyne's
ridiculous mission. But the comic when it is human becomes quickly
painful. Yes, she was infinitely anxious. And I was asking myself
whether this poignant tension of her suspense depended--to put it
plainly--on hunger or love.

The answer would have been of some interest to Captain Anthony. For my
part, in the presence of a young girl I always become convinced that the
dreams of sentiment--like the consoling mysteries of Faith--are
invincible; that it is never never reason which governs men and women.

Yet what sentiment could there have been on her part? I remembered her
tone only a moment since when she said: "That evening Captain Anthony
arrived at the cottage." And considering, too, what the arrival of
Captain Anthony meant in this connection, I wondered at the calmness with
which she could mention that fact. He arrived at the cottage. In the
evening. I knew that late train. He probably walked from the station.
The evening would be well advanced. I could almost see a dark indistinct
figure opening the wicket gate of the garden. Where was she? Did she
see him enter? Was she somewhere near by and did she hear without the
slightest premonition his chance and fateful footsteps on the flagged
path leading to the cottage door? In the shadow of the night made more
cruelly sombre for her by the very shadow of death he must have appeared
too strange, too remote, too unknown to impress himself on her thought as
a living force--such a force as a man can bring to bear on a woman's
destiny.

She glanced towards the hotel door again; I followed suit and then our
eyes met once more, this time intentionally. A tentative, uncertain
intimacy was spring