All that Durant got out of Polly was the privilege of driving her home, through mud and rain, at a melancholy trot. True, he was in no hurry to get back; so he let her take her own pace, in pity for her trembling limbs and straining heart. Polly had done all she [Pg 308] knew for her mistress in that frantic dash for freedom and the express; and, when he thought of what Frida Tancred\'s life had been, he guessed that the little animal was used to carrying her through worse storms than this.

The storm was over now; it had driven the clouds into the north, where they hung huddled and piled in a vast amphitheater; other clouds, charged with light now instead of darkness, were still rolling up from the south, east and west, their wings closed till the sky was shut in like Whithorn-in-Arden, ringed with its clouds as Arden with its woods; above, beneath, there rose the same immense, impenetrable boundary, green on the earth and gray in heaven.

And Frida Tancred had escaped from these confines, would never come back to dwell in them again; she had said so, and he believed her. To be sure, she had shown weakness at the last, she had been driven to juggle with the conscience that would not let her go; had she not persuaded it that she was leaving the Colonel for the Colonel\'s good? But once gone, once there, away over the border and safe in the promised land, she would see clearly, she would realize her right to be happy in the glorious world.

Not that these things could have happened without Georgie Chatterton. He had nothing but admiration for that young woman; there had been daring in her conquest of Frida Tancred, there were ingenuity and determination in the final elopement. Was it possible that he was piqued at the insignificance of the part she had assigned to him? She had left him to settle up the sordid accounts while she ran away with the lady. He had got to say to Colonel Tancred, "Colonel Tancred, I am not your daughter\'s seducer and abductor; I am only a miserable accessory after the fact." In [Pg 309] other words, Miss Chatterton had reminded him that he was too late.

Too late indeed, it seemed. Whether or not Miss Chatterton\'s faith in him had failed her at the last moment, but when he came down to dinner that evening he found that she had been beforehand with him; there was nothing left for him to do.

The Colonel looked up smiling from a telegram. "News from St. Pancras. Miss Chatterton is carrying my daughter off to the Continent."

"I\'m delighted to hear it. It will do her all the good in the world."

"Yes, yes; I\'m glad she should have the opportunity. I made a little tour on the Continent myself when I was a young man, and I\'ve felt a brighter fellow for it ever since."

"Really?"

"Yes. One\'s apt to get into a groove staying at home so much. There\'s nothing like rubbing brains with foreigners. It stretches you out, clears you of all your narrow insular prejudices, brings you in touch"—Durant quivered; he knew it was coming—"in touch with fresh ideas. I don\'t know how you feel about it, but six months of it was enough to convince me that there\'s no place like England, and no people like English people, and no house like my own. As for Frida, a very little goes a long way with Frida; she\'ll be sick of it in six weeks, but she\'ll settle down all the better for the change."

"You think so?"

"I do. She may be a little unsettled at first. Her poor mother was just the same—restless, restless. But she settled down."

The Colonel made no further allusion to his daughter\'s absence. He was presently disturbed about another [Pg 310] matter, bustling about the room, wondering, questioning, and exclaiming, "I have lost my little meteorological chronicle? Has anybody seen my little meteorological chronicle? Now, where did I have it last? I wonder if I could have left it with my other papers in Frida\'s room?"

But Frida\'s room, the room where she did all her father\'s writing, and her own reading and dreaming when she had time to read and dream, Frida\'s room was locked, and nobody could find the key. The Colonel, more than ever convinced that his meteorological chronicle was concealed in Frida\'s room, ordered the door to be burst open. Durant lent a shoulder to the work and entered somewhat precipitately, followed by the Colonel.

The meteorological chronicle, the labor of years, was found where its author had left it, on his writing-table, together with his other papers, business letters, household accounts, Primrose League programs, all carefully sorted, dated, and docketed. Many of the letters had been answered; they lay, addressed in Frida\'s handwriting, ready for the post. She had left her work in such perfect order that a new secretary could have been fitted into her place without a hitch. The fact was eloquent of finality and the winding up of affairs; but certain other details were more eloquent still.

Order on the writing-table; in the rest of the room confusion and disarray, rifled bookcases and dismantled walls. Fresh squares of wall-paper outlined in cobwebs marked the places where the great maps had hung. The soul of the room was gone from it with the portrait of the late Mrs. Tancred; the watercolor drawings, sad work of her restless fingers, were no longer there. The furniture had been pushed aside to make room for the deed of desecration; the floor was [Pg 311] littered with newspapers and straw; an empty packing-case lay on its side, abandoned, in a corner.

The Colonel opened round eyes of astonishment, but his mustache was still. He rang the bell and summoned the servants. Under severe cross-examination, Chaplin, the footman, gave evidence that three packing-cases had left Coton Manor for the station early in the morning before the bursting of the storm. Frida, too, had discerned the face of the sky, and—admirable strategist!—had secured her transports. The Colonel dismissed his witnesses, and appealed helplessly to Durant; indeed, the comprehension in the young man\'s face gave him an appearance of guilty complicity.

"What does it mean, Durant? what does it mean?"

Durant smiled, not without compassion. When a young woman arranges her accounts, and makes off with three packing-cases, containing her library and her mother\'s portrait, the meaning obviously is that she is not coming back again in a hurry. He suggested that perhaps Miss Tancred proposed to make a lengthier stay on the Continent than had been surmised.

"The whole thing," said the Colonel, "is incomprehensible to me."

For the rest of the evening he remained visibly subdued by the presence of the incomprehensible; after coffee he pulled himself together and prepared to face it.

"There will be no whist this evening," he announced. "You will excuse me, Durant; I have an immensity of work on hand. Chaplin, put some whiskey and water in the study, and light the little lamp on my literary machine."

Tuesday morning\'s post brought explanation. Two letters lay on the breakfast table, both from a fresh [Pg 312] hotel, the H?tel Métropole, both addressed in Frida Tancred\'s handwriting, one to the Colonel and the other to Durant. Durant\'s ran thus:

"Dear Mr. Durant:—You will explain everything to my father, won\'t you? I have done my best, but he will never see it; it is the sort of thing he never could see—my reasons for going away and staying away. They are hard to understand, but, as far as I have made them out myself, it seems that I went away for his sake; but I believe, in fact I know, that I shall stay away for my own. You will understand it; we thrashed it all out that Saturday afternoon—you remember?—and you understood then. And so I trust you.

"Always sincerely yours,
"Frida Tancred.

"P.S.—Write and tell me how he takes it. I can see it—so clearly!—from his point of view. I hope he will not be unhappy.

"P.P.S.—We sail to-morrow."

He was still knitting his brows over the opening sentences when the Colonel flicked his own letter across the table.

"Read this, Durant, and tell me what you think of it."

Durant read:

"My Dear Father:—You will see from Georgie\'s telegram that we shall be leaving England to-morrow. I did not tell you this before because it would have meant so much explanation, and if we once began explaining things I don\'t think I should ever have [Pg 313] gone at all. And I had to go. Believe me, I was convinced that in going I was doing the best thing for you. I thought you had been making sacrifices for my sake, and that you would be happier without me, though you would not say so. Whether I could have brought myself to leave you without the help of this conviction, and whether I have the conviction strongly still, I cannot say; it is hard to be perfectly honest, even with myself. But now that I have gone I simply can\'t come back again. Not yet. Perhaps never, till I have done the things I want to do.

"Of course you will be angry—it is so unexpected. But only think—you would not be angry, would you, if I married? You would have considered that perfectly legitimate. Yet it would have meant my leaving you for good. And what marriage and settling down in it is to other women, seeing the world and wandering about in it is to me—it\'s the thing I care for most. We do not talk about these things, so this is the first you have heard of it. Think—if I had been very much in love with anyone I would have said nothing about it till I was all but engaged to him. It\'s the same thing. And it will make less difference to you than my marriage would have made."

Here Frida\'s pen had come to a stop; with a sudden flight from the abstract to the concrete, she had begun a fresh argument on a fresh page.

"I only mean to use a third of my income. The other two thousand will still go to keeping up the property. I have left everything so that my work could be taken up by anybody to-morrow."

The Colonel\'s eyes had dogged Durant\'s down to the bottom of the sheet, when he made a nervous [Pg 314] attempt to recapture the letter. It was too late; the swing of Frida\'s impassioned pleading had carried Durant over the page, and one terse sentence had printed itself instantaneously on his brain. He handed back the letter without a word.

The Colonel drew Durant\'s arm in his and led him out through the window on to the gravel drive. Up and down, up and down, they walked for the space of one hour, while the Colonel poured out his soul. He went bareheaded, he lifted up his face to the heavens, touched to a deeper anguish by the beauty of the young day.

"Lord, what a perfect morning! Look at this place she\'s left; look at it! I\'ve nursed the little property f............