“D’abord, a la Gare de Sceaux!  Puis, je vous dirai.  Mais depechez-vous!”

The cab rolled away, and Delafield walked on.

Half-past seven, striking from all the Paris towers!  And Warkworth’s intention in the morning was to leave the Gare de Lyon at 7.15.  But it seemed he was now bound, at 7.30, for the Gare de Sceaux, from which point of departure it was clear that no reasonable man would think of starting for the Eternal City.

“D’abord, a la Gare de Sceaux!”

Then he was not catching a train?—­at any rate, immediately.  He had some other business first, and was perhaps going to the station to deposit his luggage?

Suddenly a thought, a suspicion, flashed through Delafield’s mind, which set his heart thumping in his breast.  In after days he was often puzzled to account for its origin, still more for the extraordinary force with which it at once took possession of all his energies.  In his more mystical moments of later life he rose to the secret belief that God had spoken to him.

At any rate, he at once hailed a cab, and, thinking no more of his dinner engagement, he drove post-haste to the Nord Station.  In those days the Calais train arrived at eight.  He reached the station a few minutes before it appeared.  When at last it drew up, amid the crowd on the platform it took him only a few seconds to distinguish the dark and elegant head of Julie Le Breton.

A pang shot through him that pierced to the very centre of life.  He was conscious of a prayer for help and a clear mind.  But on his way to the station he had rapidly thought out a plan on which to act should this mad notion in his brain turn out to have any support in reality.

It had so much support that Julie Le Breton was there—­in Paris—­and not at Bruges, as she had led the Duchess to suppose.  And when she turned her startled face upon him, his wild fancy became, for himself, a certainty.

* * * * *

“Amiens!  Cinq minutes d’arret.”

Delafield got out and walked up and down the platform.  He passed the closed and darkened windows of the sleeping-car; and it seemed to his abnormally quickened sense that he was beside her, bending over her, and that he said to her: 

“Courage!  You are saved!  Let us thank God!”

A boy from the refreshment-room came along, wheeling a barrow on which were tea and coffee.

Delafield eagerly drank a cup of tea and put his hand into his pocket to pay for it.  He found there three francs and his ticket.  After paying for the tea he examined his purse.  That contained an English half-crown.

So he had had with him just enough to get his own second-class ticket, her first-class, and a sleeping-car.  That was good fortune, seeing that the bulk of his money, with his return ticket, was reposing in his dressing-case at the Hotel du Rhin.

“En voiture!  En voiture, s’il vous plait!”