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“She comes Thursday.”

He showed not the least surprise. It was the deep calm of the fatalist. It HAD to be. “I must leave you then to-morrow.”

She looked, on this, as he had never seen her; it would have been hard to say whether what showed in her face was the last failure to follow or the first effort to meet. “And really not to come back?”

“Never, never, dear lady. Why should I come back? You can never be again what you HAVE been. I shall have seen the last of you.”

“Oh!” she touchingly urged.

“Yes, for I should next find you simply brought to self- consciousness. You’ll be exactly what you are, I charitably admit- -nothing more or less, nothing different. But you’ll be it all in a different way. We live in an age of prodigious machinery, all organised to a single end. That end is publicity–a publicity as ferocious as the appetite of a cannibal. The thing therefore is not to have any illusions–fondly to flatter yourself in a muddled moment that the cannibal will spare you. He spares nobody. He spares nothing. It will be all right. You’ll have a lovely time. You’ll be only just a public character–blown about the world ‘for all you’re worth,’ and proclaimed ‘for all you’re worth’ on the house-tops. It will be for THAT, mind, I quite recognise–because Addie is superior–as well as for all you aren’t. So good-bye.”

He remained however till the next day, and noted at intervals the different stages of their friend’s journey; the hour, this time, she would really have started, the hour she’d reach Dover, the hour she’d get to town, where she’d alight at Mrs. Dunn’s. Perhaps she’d bring Mrs. Dunn, for Mrs. Dunn would swell the chorus. At the last, on the morrow, as if in anticipation of this stillness settled between them: he became as silent as his hostess. But before he went she brought out shyly and anxiously, as an appeal, the question that for hours had clearly been giving her thought. “Do you meet her then to-night in London?”

“Dear no. In what position am I, alas! to do that? When can I EVER meet her again?” He had turned it all over. “If I could meet Addie after this, you know, I could meet YOU. And if I do meet Addie,” he lucidly pursued, “what will happen by the same stroke is that I SHALL meet you. And that’s just what I’ve explained to you I dread.”

“You mean she and I will be inseparable?”

He hesitated. “I mean she’ll tell me all about you. I can hear her and her ravings now.”

She gave again–and it was infinitely sad–her little whinnying laugh. “Oh but if what you say is true you’ll know.”

“Ah but Addie won’t! Won’t, I mean, know that I know–or at least won’t believe it. Won’t believe that any one knows. Such,” he added with a strange smothered sigh, “is Addie. Do you know,” he wound up, “that what, after all, has most definitely happened is that you’ve made me see her as I’ve never done before?”

She blinked and gasped, she wondered and despaired. “Oh no, it will be YOU. I’ve had nothing to do with it. Everything’s all you!”

But for all it mattered now! “You’ll see,” he said, “that she’s charming. I shall go for to-night to Oxford. I shall almost cross her on the way.”

“Then if she’s charming what am I to tell her from you in explanation of such strange behaviour as your flying away just as she arrives?”

“Ah you needn’t mind about that–you needn’t tell her anything.”

She fixed him as if as never again. “It’s none of my business, of course I feel; but isn’t it a little cruel if you’re engaged?”

Granger gave a laugh almost as odd as one of her own. “Oh you’ve cost me that!”–and he put out his hand to her.

She wondered while she took it. “Cost you–?”

“We’re not engaged. Good-bye.”