‘If it’s London you’re talking about,’ Twemlow said, ’I will be going up to-morrow by the midday flyer, and could look after any lady that happened to be on that train and would accept my services.’  He glanced pleasantly at Rose.

‘Oh, Mr. Twemlow!’ the girl murmured.  It was a ludicrously inadequate expression of her profound passionate gratitude to this knight; but she could say no more.

‘But can you be ready, my dear?’ Leonora inquired.

‘I am ready,’ said Rose.

‘It’s understood then,’ Twemlow said later.  ’We shall meet at the depot.  I can’t stop another moment now.  I’ve got a cab waiting outside.’

Leonora wished to ask him whether, notwithstanding his partial assurance of the previous evening, his journey would really end at Euston, or whether he was not taking London en route for New York.  But she could not bring herself to put the question.  She hoped that John might put it; John, however, was taciturn.

‘We shall see Rose off to-morrow, of course,’ was her last utterance to Twemlow.

* * * * *

Leonora and her three daughters stood in the crowd on the platform of Knype railway station, waiting for Arthur Twemlow and for the London express.  John had brought them to the station in the waggonette, had kissed Rose and purchased her ticket, and had then driven off to a creditors’ meeting at Hanbridge.  All the women felt rather mournful amid that bustle and confusion.  Leonora had said to herself again and again that it was absurd to regard this absence of Rose for a few weeks as a break in the family existence.  Yet the phrase, ’the first break, the first break,’ ran continually in her mind.  The gentle sadness of her mood noticeably affected the girls.  It was as though they had all suddenly discovered a mutual unsuspected tenderness.  Milly put her hand on Rose’s shoulder, and Rose did not resent the artless gesture.

‘I hope Mr. Twemlow isn’t going to miss it,’ said Ethel, voicing the secret apprehension of all.

‘I shan’t miss it, anyhow,’ Rose remarked defiantly.

Scarcely a minute before the train was due, Milly descried Twemlow coming out of the booking office.  They pressed through the crowd towards him.

‘Ah!’ he exclaimed genially.  ‘Here you are!  Baggage labelled?’

‘We thought you weren’t coming, Mr. Twemlow,’ Milly said.

’You did?  I was kept quite a few minutes at the hotel.  You see I only had to walk across the road.’

‘We didn’t really think any such thing,’ said Leonora.

The conversation fell to pieces.

Then the express, with its two engines, its gilded luncheon-cars, and its post-office van, thundered in, shaking the platform, and seeming to occupy the entire station.  It had the air of pausing nonchalantly, disdainfully, in its mighty rush from one distant land of romance to another, in order to suffer for a brief moment the assault of a puny and needlessly excited multitude.