“And I, too, my dear girl. I believe you would do very wrong in refusing this situation. But, Nelly, my darling, remember that this is only an experiment. You may not be happy at Hazlewood. In that case you will not fail to remember that your home is always here; that, come to it when you may, you will never fail to find a loving welcome; and that the friends you leave behind you here are friends whom nothing upon earth can ever estrange from you. Remember this, Eleanor.”
“Yes, yes, dear, dear Signora.”
“If I could have gone with her to the station, I shouldn’t have cared so much,” Richard murmured, despondingly; “but the laws of Spavin and Cromshaw are as the laws of Draco. If I don’t get on with the Swiss châlet and moonlit Alpine peaks, the new piece can’t come out on Monday.”
So poor Eleanor went to the station alone, and was overcharged by the cabman who carried the two trunks which Richard had neatly addressed to Miss Vincent, Hazlewood, Berks.
She was received by a civil porter, who took charge of her luggage while she went to the waiting-room to look for the stranger who was to be her escort.
She was no more a coquette than she had been nearly two years before when she travelled alone between London and Paris, and she was prepared to accept the services of this stranger quite as frankly as she had accepted the care and protection of the elderly gentleman who had taken charge of her upon that occasion.
But how was she to recognize the stranger? She could not walk up to every gentleman in the waiting-room, to ask him if he were Mr. Monckton.
She had in almost all her wanderings travelled in second-class carriages, and waited in second-class waiting-rooms. She shrank back, therefore, rather timidly upon the threshold of the capacious carpeted saloon, and looked a little nervously at the occupants of that gorgeous chamber. There was a group of ladies near the fireplace, and there were three gentlemen in different parts of the room. One of these gentlemen was a little man with grey hair and a red face; the other was very young and very sandy; the third was a tall man of about forty, with close-cut black hair, and a square massive face and head—not exactly a handsome face, perhaps, but a countenance not easily to be overlooked.
This tall man was standing near one of the windows, reading a newspaper. He looked up as Eleanor pushed open the swinging door.
“I wonder which of them is Mr. Monckton,” she thought. “Not that fidgety young man with the red hair, I hope.”