She didn’t follow his little joke, although she smiled faintly with pleasure at being called a woman, because she was distressfully wondering if her reluctance to let him go was a premonition of some disaster that lurked for him outside.  She so strangely wanted him to stay.  She could actually have wound her arms about him, which was a queer enough thing to want to do, as if the feelers of some nightmare-crawling horned beast were twitching for him in the darkness beyond the door.  This inordinate emotion must have some meaning, and it could have none other than that Great Granny Macleod had really had second sight, and she had inherited it; it was warning her that something dreadful was going to happen to him on his way to the hotel.  “Well, if I see anything in the papers to-morrow morning about a big man being run down by a motor-car in the fog, I’ll know there’s something in the supernatural,” said the cool elf that dwelt in her head.  But agony transfixed her like an arrow because her thought reminded her that this glorious being whose eyes blazed with serenity as other people’s eyes blaze only with rage, was susceptible to pain and would some day be subject to death.

“Good-night,” he said.  He did not know why her breath had failed and why she had raised her hand to her throat, but he knew that his presence was doing marvellous things to her, and he was sure that they were beautiful things, for everything that passed between them from now on till the end of time would be flawlessly beautiful.  “Good-night,” he said again, and stopped when he had gone a yard or two down the path simply that they might speak to each other again.  “You must shut the door.  You’re letting in the rain and cold.”

“No,” she said dreamily, sleepily, and slowly closed the door.

He went on in the impatient mood of a man who has been secretly married and must leave his wife in a poor lodging until he can disclose his marriage.

CHAPTER III

I

When she opened the door with her latchkey on Monday evening, late from a class in Advanced Commercial Spanish at Skerry’s College, and sat down in the hall to take her boots off, her mother cried out from the kitchen, “Ellen, I’ve got the grandest surprise for you!”

These fanciful women!  “And what’s that?” she cried back tolerantly, though the dark thoughts buzzed about her head like bees.  She thought she could feel better if she could only tell someone how Mr. Philip had sat by her fire like a nasty wee black imp and said that awful thing.  But she must not tell her mother, who would only be fretted by it and ask like a little anxious mouse, “You’re sure you’ve not said anything, dear?  You’re sure you’ve been a careful girl with your work, dear?” and would brace herself with heartrending bravery to meet this culminating misfortune.  “Ah, well, dear, if you do have to look round for a new post we must just manage.”  So she must keep silent and seem cheerful, though that memory was rolling round and round in her brain like a hot marble.