‘I’m not going to disappear yet,’ Lady Maud answered gravely.

They reached the stables, which occupied three sides of a square yard.  At that hour the two grooms and the stable-boy were at their supper, and the coachman had gone home to his cottage.  A big brown retriever on a chain was sitting bolt upright beside his kennel, and began to thump the flagstones with his tail as soon as he recognised Lady Maud.  From within a fox-terrier barked two or three times.  Lady Maud opened a door, and he sprang out at her yapping, but was quiet as soon as he knew her.

‘You’d better take the Lancashire Lass,’ she said to Van Torp.  ’You’re heavier than my father, but it’s not far to ride, and she’s a clever creature.’

She had turned up the electric light while speaking, for it was dark inside the stable; she got a bridle, went into the box herself, and slipped it over the mare’s pretty head.  Van Torp saw that it was useless to offer help.

‘Don’t bother about a saddle,’ he said; ‘it’s a waste of time.’

He touched the mare’s face and lips with his hand, and she understood him, and let him lead her out.  He vaulted upon her back, and Lady Maud walked beside him till they were outside the yard.

‘If you had a high hat it would look like the circus,’ she said, glancing at his evening dress.  ’Now get away!  I’ll be in town on Tuesday; let me know what happens.  Good-bye!  Be sure to let me know.’

’Yes.  Don’t worry.  I’m only going because you insist, anyhow.  Good-bye.  God bless you!’

He waved his hand, the mare sprang forward, and in a few seconds he was out of sight amongst the trees.  Lady Maud listened to the regular sound of the galloping hoofs on the turf, and at the same time from very far off she heard Margaret’s high trills and quick staccato notes.  At that moment the moon was rising through the late twilight, and a nightingale high overhead, no doubt judging her little self to be quite as great a musician as the famous Cordova, suddenly began a very wonderful piece of her own, just half a tone higher than Margaret’s, which might have distressed a sensitive musician, but did not jar in the least on Lady Maud’s ear.

Now that she had sent Van Torp on his way, she would gladly have walked alone in the park for half an hour to collect her thoughts; but people who live in the world are rarely allowed any pleasant leisure when they need it, and many of the most dramatic things in real life happen when we are in such a hurry that we do not half understand them.  So the moment that should have been the happiest of all goes dashing by when we are hastening to catch a train; so the instant of triumph after years of labour or weeks of struggling is upon us when we are perhaps positively obliged to write three important notes in twenty minutes; and sometimes, too, and mercifully, the pain of parting is numbed just as the knife strikes the nerve, by the howling confusion of a railway station that forces us to take care of ourselves and our belongings; and when the first instant of joy, or victory, or acute suffering is gone in a flash, memory never quite brings back all the happiness nor all the pain.