He was encouraged in this impulse by the thought that between her and himself there was the mysterious bond of something “meant.”  He believed vaguely in a Power, which, with designs as to human destinies, manifests its intentions by fitful gleams, vouchsafed somewhat erratically.  In this way Evie Colfax, as a beautiful, fairy-like child, had been revealed to him at the most critical instant of his life.  His mind had never hitherto gone back willingly to recollections of that night; but now he made the excursion into the past with a certain amount of pleasure.  He could see her still, looking at a picture-book, her face resting on the back of her hand, and golden ringlets falling over her bare arm.  He could see the boy, too.  He remembered that his name was Billy.  Billy who? he wondered.  He could hear the sweet, rather fretful voice calling from the shadows: 

“Evie dear, it’s time to go to bed.  Billy, I don’t believe they let you stay up as late as this at home.”

How ridiculous it would have been to remember such trivial details all these years if something hadn’t been “meant” by it.  There was a hint in the back of his mind that by the same token something might have been “meant” about the Wild Olive, too, but he had not an equal temptation to dwell on it.  The Wild Olive, he repeated, had never been “his type of girl”—­not from the very first.  It was obviously impossible for a superintending Power to “mean” things that were out of the question.

He had got no further than this when the news was conveyed to him by Mrs. Green, whom he met accidentally in the street, that Mr. Skinner, the second partner, had had a “stroke,” and had been ordered to Carlsbad.  Mrs. Skinner, so Mrs. Green’s letters from the Port informed her, was to accompany her husband.  Furthermore, Miss Colfax was seizing the opportunity to travel with them to Southampton, where she would be able to join friends who would take her to New York.  There was even a rumor that Miss Jarrott was to accompany her niece, but Mrs. Green was unable to vouch for the truth of it.  In any case, she said, there were signs of “a regular shaking up,” such as comes periodically in any great mercantile establishment; and this time, she ventured to hope, Mr. Green would get his rights.

XII

The knowledge that it was a juncture at which to execute a daring movement acted as an opiate on what would otherwise have been, for Strange, a day of frenzy.  While to the outward eye he was going quietly about his work, he was inwardly calling all his resources to his aid to devise some plan for outwitting circumstance.  After forty-eight hours of tearing at his heart and hacking at his brain, he could think of nothing more original than to take the first train down to the Port, ask the girl to be his wife, and let life work out the consequence.  At the end of two days, however, he was saved from a too deliberate defiance of the unaccounted-for inner voice, by an official communication from Mr. Jarrott.