Eighteen days elapsed, and she had begun to think it probable she should never see him again. He too then understood now: he had made out that she had secrets and reasons and impediments, that even a poor girl at the P.O. might have her complications. With the charm she had cast on him lightened by distance he had suffered a final delicacy to speak to him, had made up his mind that it would be only decent to let her alone. Never so much as during these latter days had she felt the precariousness of their relation — the happy beautiful untroubled original one, if it could only have been restored — in which the public servant and the casual public only were concerned. It hung at the best by the merest silken thread, which was at the mercy of any accident and might snap at any minute. She arrived by the end of the fortnight at the highest sense of actual fitness, never doubting that her decision was now complete. She would just give him a few days more to come back to her on a proper impersonal basis — for even to an embarrassing representative of the casual public a public servant with a conscience did owe something — and then would signify to Mr. Mudge that she was ready for the little home. It had been visited, in the further talk she had had with him at Bournemouth, from garret to cellar, and they had especially lingered, with their respectively darkened brows, before the niche into which it was to be broached to her mother that she must find means to fit.

He had put it to her more definitely than before that his calculations had allowed for that dingy presence, and he had thereby marked the greatest impression he had ever made on her. It was a stroke superior even again to his handling of the drunken soldier. What she considered that in the face of it she hung on at Cocker’s for was something she could only have described as the common fairness of a last word. Her actual last word had been, till it should be superseded, that she wouldn’t forsake her other friend, and it stuck to her through thick and thin that she was still at her post and on her honour. This other friend had shown so much beauty of conduct already that he would surely after all just re-appear long enough to relieve her, to give her something she could take away. She saw it, caught it, at times, his parting present; and there were moments when she felt herself sitting like a beggar with a hand held out to almsgiver who only fumbled. She hadn’t taken the sovereigns, but she would take the penny. She heard, in imagination, on the counter, the ring of the copper. “Don’t put yourself out any longer,” he would say, “for so bad a case. You’ve done all there is to be done. I thank and acquit and release you. Our lives take us. I don’t know much — though I’ve really been interested — about yours, but I suppose you’ve got one. Mine at any rate will take me — and where it will. Heigh-ho! Good-bye.” And then once more, for the sweetest faintest flower of all: “Only, I say — see here!” She had framed the whole picture with a squareness that included also the image of how again she would decline to “see there,” decline, as she might say, to see anywhere, see anything. Yet it befell that just in the fury of this escape she saw more than ever.

He came back one night with a rush, near the moment of their closing, and showed her a face so different and new, so upset and anxious, that almost anything seemed to look out of it but clear recognition. He poked in a telegram very much as if the simple sense of pressure, the distress of extreme haste, had blurred the remembrance of where in particular he was. But as she met his eyes a light came; it broke indeed on the spot into a positive conscious glare. That made up for everything, since it was an instant proclamation of the celebrated “danger”; it seemed to pour things out in a flood. “Oh yes, here it is — it’s upon me at last! Forget, for God’s sake, my having worried or bored you, and just help me, just save me, by getting this off without the loss of a second!” Something grave had clearly occurred, a crisis declared itself. She recognised immediately the person to whom the telegram was addressed — the Miss Dolman of Parade Lodge to whom Lady Bradeen had wired, at Dover, on the last occasion, and whom she had then, with her recollection of previous arrangements, fitted into a particular setting. Miss Dolman had figured before and not figured since, but she was now the subject of an imperative appeal. “Absolutely necessary to see you. Take last train Victoria if you can catch it. If not, earliest morning, and answer me direct either way.”

“Reply paid?” said the girl. Mr. Buckton had just departed and the counter-clerk was at the sounder. There was no other representative of the public, and she had never yet, as it seemed to her, not even in the street or in the Park, been so alone with him.

“Oh yes, reply paid, and as sharp as po............