He put the portmanteau into the luggage van, and then returned with the Gladstone bag to the side of a compartment.  She saw him place it in the network, and touch his cap as he received his douceur from the passenger who sat at the door with an evening paper in his hand.

She saw that that passenger was Herbert Courtland.

She told the footman who stood beside her to take her bag and case to the brougham and then return to help her maid with the rest of the luggage.  He followed her down the platform.

In a short time she was being driven home, her maid following with the luggage in another vehicle.

She did not begin to change her traveling dress immediately on retiring to her room.  She did not even take off her hat.  She stood at the window looking out over a scene very different from that which had been before her eyes every day during the previous week.  After a quarter of an hour’s listlessness at the window, she spent another quarter of an hour sitting motionless in a chair.  Then she rose and looked at herself in a mirror that showed her herself from head to foot.  She examined her feet with curious deliberation, and then looked with a critical side glance at the reflection of her face. (She could not fail to have noticed that it was unusually pale.) She removed her hat, surveyed herself once more, then, turning away with an exclamation of impatience, she crumpled up her hat with both her hands and flung it, just as a wicked child would have flung it, across the room.

“Let them both go together to perdition—­to perdition—­to perdition!” she said with a bitterness that had never previously been in her voice.  “Let them go together.  I have done my best for them—­for her—­for her.  I give them up now for evermore.”

After a minute or two of statuesque passion she went across the room and picked up her bruised hat.  She looked at it, turning it round in her hands.  Then she dropped it suddenly, and flung herself upon the sofa, crying out in a whirlwind of tears: 

“Oh, Ella, Ella, I would have saved you—­I meant to save you, indeed!  I would have done everything to save you—­everything!”

CHAPTER XXXIII.

I WONDER IF I EVER LOVED YOU UNTIL THIS MOMENT.

It was a rather tedious evening for Ella Linton after Phyllis had taken her departure.  Why on earth, she asked herself, had she been such a fool as to lay out her plans to have this lonely evening?  Then she remembered that two of her guests had meant to stay until Wednesday morning, but had received a letter necessitating their departure for town on Monday night.  But this fact should not have condemned her to a solitary evening, Ella reflected.  She should have been thoughtful enough to change her own plans to correspond with the change in the plans of her guests.  A nice, quiet, contemplative evening beside the still waters may suit the requirements of some temperaments, but it was not just what Ella regarded as most satisfying to her mood of the hour.  It was a long time since she had spent a lonely evening, and although she had now rather more food for contemplation than at any other period of her life, she did not feel contemplative.