situation: therefore how could she also know where a poor girl in

the P.O. might really stand? It was more and more between them
that if he might convey to her he was free, with all the impossible

locked away into a closed chapter, her own case might become
different for her, she might understand and meet him and listen.

But he could convey nothing of the sort, and he only fidgeted and
floundered in his want of power. The chapter wasn't in the least

closed, not for the other party; and the other party had a pull,
somehow and somewhere: this his whole attitude and expression

confessed, at the same time that they entreated her not to remember
and not to mind. So long as she did remember and did mind he could

only circle about and go and come, doing futile things of which he
was ashamed. He was ashamed of his two words to Dr. Buzzard; he

went out of the shop as soon as he had crumpled up the paper again
and thrust it into his pocket. It had been an abject little

exposure of dreadful impossible passion. He appeared in fact to be
too ashamed to come back. He had once more left town, and a first

week elapsed, and a second. He had had naturally to return to the
real mistress of his fate; she had insisted--she knew how to

insist, and he couldn't put in another hour. There was always a
day when she called time. It was known to our young friend

moreover that he had now been dispatching telegrams from other
offices. She knew at last so much that she had quite lost her

earlier sense of merely guessing. There were no different shades
of distinctness--it all bounced out.

CHAPTER XXII
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 actualfitness, 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 possible, please."

She affixed the stamps in a flash. "She'll catch the train!" she
then declared to him breathlessly" target="_blank" title="ad.气喘吁吁地">breathlessly, as if she could absolutely

guarantee it.
"I don't know--I hope so. It's awfully important. So kind of you.

Awfully sharp, please." It was wonderfullyinnocent now, his
oblivion of all but his danger. Anything else that had ever passed

between them was utterly out of it. Well, she had wanted him to be
impersonal!

There was less of the same need therefore, happily, for herself;
yet she only took time, before she flew to the sounder, to gasp at

him: "You're in trouble?"
"Horrid, horrid--there's a row!" But they parted, on it, in the

next breath; and as she dashed at the sounder, almost pushing, in
her violence, the counter-clerk off the stool, she caught the bang

with which, at Cocker's door, in his further precipitation, he
closed the apron of the cab into which he had leaped. As he

rebounded to some other precaution suggested by his alarm, his
appeal to Miss Dolman flashed straight away.

But she had not, on the morrow, been in the place five minutes
before he was with her again, still more discomposed and quite,

now, as she said to herself, like a frightened child coming to its
mother. Her companions were there, and she felt it to be