And then she learned that she had been worrying herself to no purpose whatever.  Mr Bittenger was leaving on the morrow, the morrow being Christmas Eve.  Stephen would drive him to Bursley in the morning.  He would go to the Five Towns Hotel to get his baggage, and catch the Liverpool express at noon.  He had booked a passage on the Saxonia, which sailed at threethirty o’clock.  Thus he would spend his Christmas at sea; and, spending his Christmas at sea, he could not possibly kill Stephen in the village of Sneyd on Christmas night.

Relief!  And yet a certain vague regret in the superstitious little heart!  The little heart went to bed again.  And Stephen and the stranger stayed up talking very late—­doubtless about the famous cure.

The leave-taking the next morning increased the vague regret.  Mr Bittenger was the possessor of an attractive individuality, and Vera pondered upon its attractiveness far into the afternoon.  How nicely Mr Bittenger had thanked her for her gracious hospitality—­ with what meaning he had charged the expression of his deep regret at leaving her!

After all, dreams were nonsense.

She was sitting in the bow-window of the drawing-room, precisely as she had been sitting twenty-four hours previously, when whom should she see, striding masculinely along the drive towards the house, but Mr Bittenger?

This time she was much more perturbed even than she had been by the revelation of Mr Bittenger’s baldness.

After all—­

She uprose, the blood having rushed to her head, and retreated she knew not whither, blindly, without a purpose.  And found herself in a little morning-room which was scarcely ever used, at the end of the hall.  She had not shut the door.  And Mr Bittenger, having been admitted by a servant, caught sight of her, and breezily entered her retreat, clad in his magnificent furs.

And as he doffed the furs, he gaily told her what had happened.  Owing to difficulties with the Cheswardine mare on the frosty, undulating road between Sneyd and Bursley, and owing to delays with his baggage at the Five Towns Hotel, he had just missed the Liverpool express, and, therefore, the steamer also.  He had returned to Stephen’s manufactory.  Stephen had insisted that he should spend his Christmas with them.  And, in brief, there he was.  He had walked from Bursley.  Stephen, kept by business, was coming later, and so was some of the baggage.

Mr Bittenger’s face radiated joy.  The loss of his twenty-guinea passage on the Saxonia did not appear to cause him the least regret.

And he sat down by the side of Vera.

And Vera suddenly noticed that they were on a sofa—­the sofa of her dream—­and she fancied she recognized the room.

‘You know, my dear lady,’ said Mr Bittenger, looking her straight in the eyes, ’I’m just glad I missed my steamer.  It gives me a chance to spend a Christmas in England, and in your delightful society—­your delightful society—­’ He gazed at her, without adding to the sentence.