“I will see the last of you.  I will wait for you here.  An express runs ahead of your train, and I have arranged with the clerk for a signal; I have an eye on the window.”

“You are still my best friend, Mr. Whitford.”

“Though?”

“Well, though you do not perfectly understand what torments have driven me to this.”

“Carried on tides and blown by winds?”

“Ah! you do not understand.”

“Mysteries?”

“Sufferings are not mysteries, they are very simple facts.”

“Well, then, I don’t understand.  But decide at once.  I wish you to have your free will.”

She left the room.

Dry stockings and boots are better for travelling in than wet ones, but in spite of her direct resolve, she felt when drawing them on like one that has been tripped.  The goal was desirable, the ardour was damped.  Vernon’s wish that she should have her free will compelled her to sound it:  and it was of course to go, to be liberated, to cast off incubus and hurt her father? injure Crossjay? distress her friends?  No, and ten times no!

She returned to Vernon in haste, to shun the reflex of her mind.

He was looking at a closed carriage drawn up at the station door.

“Shall we run over now, Mr. Whitford?”

“There’s no signal.  Here it’s not so chilly.”

“I ventured to enclose my letter to papa in yours, trusting you would attend to my request to you to break the news to him gently and plead for me.”

“We will all do the utmost we can.”

“I am doomed to vex those who care for me.  I tried to follow your counsel.”

“First you spoke to me, and then you spoke to Miss Dale; and at least you have a clear conscience.”

“No.”

“What burdens it?”

“I have done nothing to burden it.”

“Then it’s a clear conscience.”

“No.”

Vernon’s shoulders jerked.  Our patience with an innocent duplicity in women is measured by the place it assigns to us and another.  If he had liked he could have thought:  “You have not done but meditated something to trouble conscience.”  That was evident, and her speaking of it was proof too of the willingness to be dear.  He would not help her.  Man’s blood, which is the link with women and responsive to them on the instant for or against, obscured him.  He shrugged anew when she said:  “My character would have been degraded utterly by my staying there.  Could you advise it?”

“Certainly not the degradation of your character,” he said, black on the subject of De Craye, and not lightened by feelings which made him sharply sensible of the beggarly dependant that he was, or poor adventuring scribbler that he was to become.

“Why did you pursue me and wish to stop me, Mr. Whitford?” said Clara, on the spur of a wound from his tone.

He replied:  “I suppose I’m a busybody; I was never aware of it till now.”