CHAPTER VII.
An Early Train and a Morning's Amusement.
It was still early when he awoke, weary, stiff, and unrefreshed, but with a conviction in his mind that had grown plain and strong in the mysterious way notions sometimes seem to gather force in hours of unconsciousness, and surprise us with their mature vigor when we awake. "I must go!" he kept muttering to himself; "I must go—go and think. I dare do nothing now." He hastily packed a hand bag, wrote a note for Eugene, asking that the rest of his luggage might be forwarded to an address he would send, went quietly downstairs, and, finding the door just opened, passed out unseen. He had three miles to walk to the station, but his restless feet brought him there quickly, and he had more than an hour to wait for the first train, at half-past eight. He sat down on the platform and waited. His capacity for thought and emotion seemed for the time exhausted. His thoughts wandered from one trivial matter to another, always eluding his effort to fix them. He found himself acutely studying the gang of laborers who were going by train to their day's work, and wondering how many pipes each of their carefully guarded matches would light, and what each carried in his battered tin drinking-bottle, remembering with a dreary sort of amusement that he had heard this same incurable littleness of thought settled on men condemned to death. Still, it passed the time, and he was surprised out of a sort of reverie by the clanging of the porter's inharmonious bell.
At the same moment a phaeton was rapidly driven up to the door of the station, and all the porters rushed to meet it.
"Label it all for London," he heard Eugene's voice say. "Four boxes, a portmanteau, and a hat-box. No, I'm not going—this lady and gentleman."
Kate, Haddington, and Eugene came through the ticket-office on to the platform. Stafford involuntarily shrank back.
"Just in time!" Eugene was saying; "though why the dickens you people will start at such an hour, I don't know. Haddington, I suppose, always must be in a hurry—never does for a rising man to admit he's got spare time. But you, Kate! Its positively uncomplimentary!"
He spoke lightly, but there was a troubled look on his face; and as Haddington went off to take the tickets he drew near to Kate, and said suddenly:
"You are determined on this, Kate?"
"On what?" she asked coldly.