"Very well—I'll 'phone her."
I paused with my finger on the doorknob. "I can say 'moral fatigue' to her, I suppose."
Ingram seemed to think a moment. I wondered whether I had sounded impertinent.
"Yes," he said, slowly. "I think you can say it to her."
I reached Charing Cross with nearly ten minutes in hand. The 3.45 Continental, having probably thrown every local and slow train on the line half an hour out of its reckoning, was signalled "on time." A long line of porters was strung out along the curved platform. Motor-cars and carriages awaited the great ones of the earth, and a score of people paced the flagstones. Among them a couple of press men nodded absently to me. Punctually to time and quietly, as the expected always happens, the Folkestone express pushed its smoky old nose into the station. Porters shouted and jumped on the step, doors flew open, and the platform was covered in a trice with a jostling crowd of veiled women and ulstered men, the awkwardness of the long journey still in their cramped limbs. My trained eye searched the crowd rapidly but thoroughly for the girl I was to meet, and presently I saw her, beautiful, happily anxious, becomingly disordered from travel, and with perhaps a warmer pallor in her cheeks than when I had seen her last. She did not know me, of course, and it was the strangest, saddest thing in the world to feel myself scanned unconcernedly and passed over by the expectant eyes I had come to cloud, and maybe fill with tears. I reached her side and lifted my hat.
"Miss Barbour, I think."
She looked at me with a slight stiffening of the figure.
"My name is Prentice. I am a friend of Paul Ingram's."
"Of Paul's? Is he here?"
"Miss Barbour, pray do not be alarmed or anxious. Ingram is not quite well enough to meet the train and has asked me——"