He was surprised, and could not hide it.  The gentle, simple, shrinking girl had changed into a self-reliant, keen-sighted woman, and from the serene height of her gracious womanhood calmly convicted him of his folly and his besetting weakness, and, manlike, his first impulse, thus convicted, was to resent her interference.

’Whatever I may do, it can’t affect you now, you are so far removed from me,’ he said, without looking at her; and Gladys, disappointed, and a little indignant, rose to go.

‘Very well; good-bye.  It is always the same kind of good-bye,’ she said quietly.  ’If ever, when you look back upon it, it should grieve you, remember it was always your doing, yours alone.  But even yet, though you may not believe it, Walter, your old friend will remain quite unchanged.’

His face flushed, and he dashed his hand with a hasty gesture across his eyes.

‘I am not changed,’ he said huskily.  ’You need not reproach me with that.  You know nothing about the struggle it is for me here, nor what I have to fight against.  It was you who taught me first to be discontented with my lot, to strive after something higher.  I sometimes wish now that we had never met.’

’Whatever happens, Walter, I shall never wish that; and I hope one day you will be sorry for ever having said such a thing,’ she said, with a proud ring in her clear, sweet voice.  ’I hope—­I hope one day everything will be made right; just now it all seems so very wrong and hard to bear.’

She left him hurriedly then, just as she had left him before, at the moment when he could have thrown himself at her feet, and revealed to her all the surging passion of his soul.

Gladys felt so saddened and disheartened that she could not bear to return to Bellairs Crescent, to the inevitable questioning which she knew awaited her there.  If the Fordyces were kind, they were also a trifle fussy, and sometimes nettled Gladys by their too obvious and exacting interest in her concerns.  She ran up to the office in St. Vincent Street, and told Mr. Fordyce she was going off to Mauchline by the one-o’clock train, and begged him to send a boy with an explanation to the Crescent.  Mr. Fordyce was very good-natured, and not at all curious; it never occurred to him to try and dissuade her from such a hurried departure, or pester her with questions about it.  He simply set her down to write her note at his own desk, then took her out to lunch, and finally put her in her train, all in his own easy, pleasant, fatherly way, and Gladys felt profoundly grateful to him.

Her arrival being unexpected, there was no one to meet her at Mauchline Station, but the two-and-a-half-mile walk did not in the least disconcert her.  It seemed as if the clear, cool south wind—­the wind the huntsman loves—­blew all the city cobwebs from her brain, and again raised her somewhat jaded spirits.  She could even think hopefully of Liz, and her mind was full of schemes for her redemption, when she espied, at a short distance from her own gates, the solitary figure of Teen, with her hand shading her eyes, looking anxiously down the road.  She had found life at Bourhill insufferably dull without its mistress.