The milk-train was about an hour overdue, which would make it about due in the South. Green seated himself on a wooden bench and folded his hands over the silver crook of his walking-stick. The situation was now perfectly clear to him. She had come down from her room, and had seen his name on the register, had been seized by a terrible panic, and had fled.
Had he been alone and unobserved, he might have attempted to knock his brains out with his walking-stick. He desired to, earnestly, when he realised what an ass he had been to sign the register.
She had begun to pace the platform, nervously, halting and leaning forward from time to time to scan impatiently the long, glittering perspective of the metals.
It had begun to grow dusk. Lanterns on switches and semaphores flashed out red, green,[225] blue, white, stringing their jewelled sparks far away into the distance.
To and fro she paced the empty platform, passing and repassing him. And he began to notice presently that she looked at him rather intently each time.
He wondered whether she suspected his identity. Guiltless of anything that he could remember having done, nevertheless he shivered guiltily every time she glanced at him.
Then the unexpected happened; and he fairly shook in his shoes as she marched deliberately up to him.
"I beg your pardon," she said in a very sweet and anxious voice, "but might I ask if you happen to be going to Ormond?"
He was on his feet, hat in hand, by this time; his heart and pulses badly stampeded; but he managed to answer calmly that he was going to Ormond.
"There is only a milk-train, I understand," she said.