"Don't worry over whatever's happened you down there," he said at the last, jerking back his head at the hospitable mansion she had just left. "They're a dull crowd. We'll meet a very different lot later on. Good-bye! Keep fit and don't grizzle. I'll wire your mother that you're on your way."
He stood gazing after the tail of the train as the gray distance sucked it in to a point.
"You were a pretty wench, Bill," he heard a voice say behind him in the porters' room. The homely comment jarred him, but it also readjusted a view that had been inclining dangerously toward the romantic. Is there, I often wonder, some inbred memory of old disaster that makes Englishmen afraid of romance? Bryan, as he plodded homeward on his stiff hunter, almost laughed to remember that he had suddenly sickened of the chase, sickened of everything, and ridden back eight muddy miles on a beaten horse to see this girl, and—who knows?—perhaps to ask her to be his wife—if she had insisted upon it.
Shawled and pillowed at Wolverhampton by the guard's care, and quite tired out, Fenella slept, as warm as a dormouse under the snow, nearly all the way to Euston. A new ring from the clanging permanent way, more metallic, more menacing, as the train, sighting its goal afar off, made up its schedule time, roused her from a dream—ah! how deadly sweet of sun-steeped dunes, of outspread skies and seas, her poor little "land of lost content." The carriage pitched and rocked, lights twinkled together behind the bare trees, suburban pavements, and broadways blazing in blue-white light flashed past the windows. She put out her head against the cold, gritty rush of wind, and looked toward a red glare in the sky. Somewhere in that man-made wilderness of stone and brick, from whose smouldering discontents reddened smoke seemed to be ascending to heaven, he lived and moved and had his being who but now, in the lilied meadows of her dream, had held her against his breast and kissed away the desolate ache at her heart. Back to him, and he could not hinder—straight, straight as a homing-bird she was flying. With every moment that passed the distance that sundered them was being annihilated. Intense unreasoning joys! triumph almost lyrical of spirit over matter! God's crowning mercy in affliction!—manna from Heaven, and portion of the outcast!
VIII
LADY ANNE'S DEPOSITION
We wonder if it has ever happened to any of our readers—being a common human experience, it probably has—on the very morrow of some change which they had assayed, light-heartedly, experimentally, and with all provision made for honorable retreat in case of failure, to find the retreat, as it were, cut off, the old life put out of their reach once and for all, and success in the new becomes the condition not of a pleasanter manner of existence, but of very existence itself.
We know that Fenella's independence of the career she had chosen was never as complete as appearances seemed to warrant. Even if it had been so, hers was not the temperament to discover comfort in any such ignoble security. She had the bright confidence of her youth. Eager for the contest, she was not afraid of any of the rules. And if the comfortable thought that, after all, the worst that could happen her would be a return to domestic conditions with her one ambition quenched, visited her at all in despondent moods, it was rather owing to Madame de Rudder's insistence upon the fact, as the great strategic advantage in a campaign which about this time that lady began to conduct with Mr. Joseph Dollfus—a campaign carried on so pertinaciously and with such utter disregard for the Dominion manager's feelings, that he often wondered whether any inkling of the secret clause, the Lumsden clause, of the treaty could have reached her. If it hadn't, her bluff was a masterpiece.
"I'm afraid Joe Dollfus was rather rude to you to-day, dear," Fenella said to her old mistress one afternoon over the teacups. Madame's irruption into the affair upon the strength of an old "understanding" which her pupil could neither remember nor would deny, had, in fact, at last proved too much for Mr. Dollfus's manners.