She heard now the bell of her own train.  Driving beside the railway embankment she met the train:  it was eighteen minutes late, by her watch.  And why, when it flung up its whale-spouts of steam, she was not journeying in it, she could not tell.  She had acted of her free will:  that she could say.  Vernon had not induced her to remain; assuredly her present companion had not; and her whole heart was for flight:  yet she was driving back to the Hall, not devoid of calmness.  She speculated on the circumstance enough to think herself incomprehensible, and there left it, intent on the scene to come with Willoughby.

“I must choose a better day for London,” she remarked.

De Craye bowed, but did not remove his eyes from her.

“Miss Middleton, you do not trust me.”

She answered:  “Say in what way.  It seems to me that I do.”

“I may speak?”

“If it depends on my authority.”

“Fully?”

“Whatever you have to say.  Let me stipulate, be not very grave.  I want cheering in wet weather.”

“Miss Middleton, Flitch is charioteer once more.  Think of it.  There’s a tide that carries him perpetually to the place where he was cast forth, and a thread that ties us to him in continuity.  I have not the honour to be a friend of long standing:  one ventures on one’s devotion:  it dates from the first moment of my seeing you.  Flitch is to blame, if any one.  Perhaps the spell would be broken, were he reinstated in his ancient office.”

“Perhaps it would,” said Clara, not with her best of smiles.  Willoughby’s pride of relentlessness appeared to her to be receiving a blow by rebound, and that seemed high justice.

“I am afraid you were right; the poor fellow has no chance,” De Craye pursued.  He paused, as for decorum in the presence of misfortune, and laughed sparklingly:  “Unless I engage him, or pretend to!  I verily believe that Flitch’s melancholy person on the skirts of the Hall completes the picture of the Eden within.—­Why will you not put some trust in me, Miss Middleton?”

“But why should you not pretend to engage him then, Colonel De Craye?”

“We’ll plot it, if you like.  Can you trust me for that?”

“For any act of disinterested kindness, I am sure.”

“You mean it?”

“Without reserve.  You could talk publicly of taking him to London.”

“Miss Middleton, just now you were going.  My arrival changed your mind.  You distrust me:  and ought I to wonder?  The wonder would be all the other way.  You have not had the sort of report of me which would persuade you to confide, even in a case of extremity.  I guessed you were going.  Do you ask me how?  I cannot say.  Through what they call sympathy, and that’s inexplicable.  There’s natural sympathy, natural antipathy.  People have to live together to discover how deep it is!”

Clara breathed her dumb admission of his truth.