icket and passed through the gate,
she saw Mrs. Murray, who had not got out of the pony-carriage, lean
forward and, taking hold of Eleanor's two hands, draw her under the shade
of the enormous mushroom hat and kiss her affectionately. The hat got
somewhat disarranged in the process, and Mrs. Murray righted it with a
pleasant low laugh that came distinctly to Margaret's ears as she sat
watching the little scene from the corner of the third-class carriage.

Then she seemed to be asking Eleanor some questions, which the latter
answered readily through the ear-trumpet which Mrs. Murray held out to
her. Once they looked in her direction, and a spasm of alarm shot through
Margaret's mind. Surely, surely Eleanor was not abandoning their
conspiracy at the very outset of its career. The trunk had already been
hoisted on to the top of the somewhat dilapidated looking old bus that
evidently plied between the distant village of Windy Gap and the station.
Why, then, did the pony-carriage not drive on, or why did the train not
start? Eleanor looked again towards the carriage in which Margaret sat in
a perfect fever of impatience to be off, and then, after saying something
to Mrs. Murray, to which the latter gave an affirmative nod, she left the
carriage and came running up the platform. Margaret could have cried with
disappointment. She had no doubt at all that Eleanor had already repented
of her scheme, and was coming to say that it must be given up. Eleanor
reached the door in a somewhat breathless condition, and Margaret
resisting her first impulse to shut the window and to draw down the
blind, and refuse to listen to a word she was going to say, put her head
reluctantly out.

"I couldn't help coming to tell you that she is a perfectly sweet old
lady," Eleanor panted. "And she gave me such a warm welcome that I feel
an awful fraud, and----"

Margaret interrupted her with an exclamation that sounded almost like a
wail of despair.

"And you have come to tell me that you want to change back into your own
self?" she said.

"No, not much," Eleanor said hurriedly; "but the point is, do you? She
seems to be perfectly charming, and I don't believe she would be very
angry. And oh, Margaret! I feel as though I ought not to oust you from
house and home in this way."

Margaret's brow cleared as though by magic. It was all right then.
Strange though it undoubtedly appeared to her, Eleanor was not only
willing but actually eager to go to