“You will find that the whole blame for this unconventional happening devolves upon me,” Julian declared.

“It was entirely my fault,” Catherine murmured repentantly.  “I am so sorry to have given any one cause for distress.  I do not know, even now—­”

She turned towards Julian.  He leaned forward and raised her fingers to his lips.

“Catherine,” he said, “every one is a little overwrought.  Our misunderstanding is finished.  Princess, I shall try to win your forgiveness to-morrow.”

The Princess smiled faintly.

“Catherine is so unusual,” she complained.

Julian held open the door, and they all filed away down the corridor, from which Lord Shervinton had long since beat a hurried retreat.  He stood there until they reached the bend.  Catherine, who was leaning on his father’s arm, turned around.  She waved her hand a little irresolutely.  She was too far off for him to catch her expression, but there was something pathetic in her slow, listless walk, from which all the eager grace of a few hours ago seemed to have departed.

It was not until they were nearing London, on the following afternoon, that Catherine awoke from a lethargy during which she had spent the greater portion of the journey.  From her place in the corner seat of the compartment in which they had been undisturbed since leaving Wells, she studied her companion through half-closed eyes.  Julian was reading an article in one of the Reviews and remained entirely unconscious of her scrutiny.  His forehead was puckered, his mouth a little contemptuous.  It was obvious that he did not wholly approve of what he was reading.

Catherine, during those few hours of solitude, was conscious of a subtle, slowly growing change in her mental attitude towards her companion.  Until the advent of those dramatic hours at Maltenby, she had regarded him as a pleasant, even a charming acquaintance, but as belonging to a type with which she was entirely and fundamentally out of sympathy.  The cold chivalry of his behaviour on the preceding night and the result of her own reflections as she sat there studying him made her inclined to doubt the complete accuracy of her first judgment.  She found something unexpectedly intellectual and forceful in his present concentration,—­in the high, pale forehead, the deep-set but alert eyes.  His long, loose frame was yet far from ungainly; his grey tweed suit and well-worn brown shoes the careless attire of a man who has no need to rely on his tailor for distinction.  His hands, too, were strong and capable.  She found herself suddenly wishing that the man himself were different, that he belonged to some other and more congenial type.

Julian, in course of time, laid down the Review which he had been studying and looked out of the window.

“We shall be in London in three quarters of an hour,” he announced politely.

She sat up and yawned, produced her vanity case, peered into the mirror, and used her powder puff with the somewhat piquant assurance of the foreigner.  Then she closed her dressing case with a snap, pulled down her veil, and looked across at him.