The train began to puff more loudly, as it slackened its pace.  It was drawing near to a rustic little station, and, as it passed in, he saw a carriage standing outside, waiting on the road, and a footman in a long coat, glancing into each window as the train went by.  Two or three country people were watching it intently.  Miss Vanderpoel’s father was coming up from London on it.  The stationmaster rushed to open the carriage door, and the footman hastened forward, but a tall lovely thing in grey was opposite the step as Mr. Vanderpoel descended it to the platform.  She did not recognise the presence of any other human being than himself.  For the moment she seemed to forget even the broad-shouldered man who had plainly come with her.  As Reuben S. Vanderpoel folded her in his arms, she folded him and kissed him as he was not sure she had ever kissed him before.

“My splendid Betty!  My own fine girl!” he said.

And when she cried out “Father!  Father!” she bent and kissed the breast of his coat.

He knew who the big young man was before she turned to present him.

“This is Lord Mount Dunstan, father,” she said.  “Since Nigel was brought home, he has been very good to us.”

Reuben S. Vanderpoel looked well into the man’s eyes, as he shook hands with him warmly, and this was what he said to himself: 

“Yes, she’s safe.  This is quite safe.  It is to be trusted with the whole thing.”

Not many days after her husband’s arrival at Stornham Court, Mrs. Vanderpoel travelled down from London, and, during her journey, scarcely saw the wintry hedges and bare trees, because, as she sat in her cushioned corner of the railway carriage, she was inwardly offering up gentle, pathetically ardent prayers of gratitude.  She was the woman who prays, and the many sad petitions of the past years were being answered at last.  She was being allowed to go to Rosy—­whatsoever happened, she could never be really parted from her girl again.  She asked pardon many times because she had not been able to be really sorry when she had heard of her son-in-law’s desperate condition.  She could feel pity for him in his awful case, she told herself, but she could not wish for the thing which perhaps she ought to wish for.  She had confided this to her husband with innocent, penitent tears, and he had stroked her cheek, which had always been his comforting way since they had been young things together.

“My dear,” he said, “if a tiger with hydrophobia were loose among a lot of decent people—­or indecent ones, for the matter of that—­you would not feel it your duty to be very sorry if, in springing on a group of them, he impaled himself on an iron fence.  Don’t reproach yourself too much.”  And, though the realism of the picture he presented was such as to make her exclaim, “No!  No!” there were still occasional moments when she breathed a request for pardon if she was hard of heart—­this softest of creatures human.