“I don’t know, my dear,” she responded gently, and with her hand on Adams’s arm, she ran down the steps and into the carriage before the door.  As they drove away, she looked up at him with a tender little smile.

“I am so glad that she has you,” she said.

“In having you, she has a great deal more.”

“It is you who have done it all—­you expected me to have courage, so I have it.  Had you expected me to be cowardly, I should have been so.”

“Well, I expect you to save her,” he answered quietly.

“Does she need it?  What was it?  What does it mean?”

“You’ll know to-night, perhaps.  I shall never know, but what does it matter?”

“I saw Arnold to-day,” she said, “he is terribly—­terribly—­” she hesitated for a word, “cut up about it.  Yet he swears he can’t for the life of him see that he was to blame.  Had he been to blame, he says, he would have shot himself.”

“Would he?” he remarked indifferently.

“He sails for Europe on Saturday—­if he hears she’s found.”

He bit back an exclamation of anger.

“What, under heaven, has he to do with it?” he asked.

“A great deal, one would think.  But have you seen her?  Tell me of her.”

“Be good to her,” he answered, “she is in a hard place and needs a great deal of love.”

“And we can give it to her, you and I?”

“Mine is hers already, if it’s any help.”

“Was it hers before she knew Arnold even?”

“Long before—­before he or you or I were born.”

“And does she understand?”

“She doesn’t know—­but what difference does that make?”

Her eyes, in the flickering light, gave him an impression of remoteness as of dim stars.

“I wonder how it feels to be loved like that?” she said, a little wistfully.

“You would never have cared for it,” he answered, with a flash of his penetrating insight, “for the kind of man who could have loved you in that way you couldn’t have loved.”

“You mean that I was born to adore the god in the brute?” she asked.

“Oh, well, so long as it’s the god!” he retorted laughing.

But she paid no heed to his remark, and drawing her coat about her as if she were cold, she sat in silence until the carriage was driven upon the ferry and they began the trip across.

“She came this way all alone and at night?” she said.

“How or why we shall probably never know entirely,” he answered.  “I doubt if she realised herself where she was going.”

“It looks meaningless from a distance, but, I suppose, in reality, it was a courageous flight?”

“Yes, I think there was courage in it,” he responded quietly.

She turned her eyes away, looking out as they drove through the open country upon the black fields and the stars.  Neither of them spoke again until the carriage stopped and the footman jumped down to ask for some directions.  Then as they drew up presently before the little gate, Adams helped her out and along the path into the house.