She took her seat; Mrs. Hannaford stood awaiting the departure of the train.  Before it moved, the man Irene had noticed came back along the platform, and passed them without a sign.  Irene saw his face, and seemed to recognise it, but could not remember who he was.

Half an hour later, the face came back to her, and with it a name.

“Daniel Otway!” she exclaimed to herself.

It was five years and more since her one meeting with him at Ewell, but the man, on that occasion, had impressed her strongly in a very disagreeable way.  She had since heard of him, in relation to Piers Otway’s affairs, and knew that her aunt had received a call from him in Bryanston Square.  What could be the meaning of this incident on the platform?  Irene wondered, and had an unpleasant feeling about it.

CHAPTER XX

On the journey homeward, and for two or three days after, Piers held argument with his passions, trying to persuade himself that he had in truth lost nothing, inasmuch as his love had never been founded upon a reasonable hope.  Irene Derwent was neither more nor less to him now than she had been ever since he first came to know her:  a far ideal, the woman he would fain call wife, but only in a dream could think of winning.  What audacity had speeded him on that wild expedition?  It was well that he had been saved from declaring his folly to Irene herself, who would have shared the pain her answer inflicted.  Nay, when the moment came, reason surely would have checked his absurd impulse.  In seeing her once more, he saw how wide was the distance between them.  No more of that!  He had lost nothing but a moment’s illusion.

The ideal remained; the worship, the gratitude.  How much she had been to him!  Rarely a day—­very rarely a day—­that the thought of Irene did not warm his heart and exalt his ambition.  He had yielded to the fleshly impulse, and the measure of his lapse was the sincerity of that nobler desire; he had not the excuse of the ordinary man, nor ever tried to allay his conscience with facile views of life.  What times innumerable had he murmured her name, until it was become to him the only woman’s name that sounded in truth womanly—­all others cold to his imagination.  What long evenings had he passed, yonder by the Black Sea, content merely to dream of Irene Derwent; how many a summer night had he wandered in the acacia-planted streets of Odessa, about and about the great square, with its trees, where stands the cathedral; how many a time had his heart throbbed all but to bursting when he listened to the music on the Boulevard, and felt so terribly alone—­alone!  Irene was England.  He knew nothing of the patriotism which is but shouted politics; from his earliest years of intelligence he had learnt, listening to his father, a contempt for that loud narrowness; but the tongue which was Irene’s, the landscape where shone Irene’s figure—­these were dear to him for Irene’s sake.  He believed in his heart of hearts that only the Northern Island could boast the perfect woman—­because he had found her there.