by the valance of the bed.  She went down, flushed and light-hearted, to the Widgetts’ after lunch to make some final arrangements and then, as soon as her aunt had retired to lie down for her usual digestive hour, took the risk of the servants having the enterprise to report her proceedings and carried her bag and hold-all to the garden gate, whence Teddy, in a state of ecstatic service, bore them to the railway station.  Then she went up-stairs again, dressed herself carefully for town, put on her most businesslike-looking hat, and with a wave of emotion she found it hard to control, walked down to catch the 3.17 up-train.

Teddy handed her into the second-class compartment her season-ticket warranted, and declared she was “simply splendid.”  “If you want anything,” he said, “or get into any trouble, wire me.  I’d come back from the ends of the earth.  I’d do anything, Vee.  It’s horrible to think of you!”

“You’re an awful brick, Teddy!” she said.

“Who wouldn’t be for you?”

The train began to move.  “You’re splendid!” said Teddy, with his hair wild in the wind.  “Good luck!  Good luck!”

She waved from the window until the bend hid him.

She found herself alone in the train asking herself what she must do next, and trying not to think of herself as cut off from home or any refuge whatever from the world she had resolved to face.  She felt smaller and more adventurous even than she had expected to feel.  “Let me see,” she said to herself, trying to control a slight sinking of the heart, “I am going to take a room in a lodging-house because that is cheaper....  But perhaps I had better get a room in an hotel to-night and look round....

“It’s bound to be all right,” she said.

But her heart kept on sinking.  What hotel should she go to?  If she told a cabman to drive to an hotel, any hotel, what would he do—­or say?  He might drive to something dreadfully expensive, and not at all the quiet sort of thing she required.  Finally she decided that even for an hotel she must look round, and that meanwhile she would “book” her luggage at Waterloo.  She told the porter to take it to the booking-office, and it was only after a disconcerting moment or so that she found she ought to have directed him to go to the cloak-room.  But that was soon put right, and she walked out into London with a peculiar exaltation of mind, an exaltation that partook of panic and defiance, but was chiefly a sense of vast unexampled release.

She inhaled a deep breath of air—­London air.

Part 3

She dismissed the first hotels she passed, she scarcely knew why, mainly perhaps from the mere dread of entering them, and crossed Waterloo Bridge at a leisurely pace.  It was high afternoon, there was no great throng of foot-passengers, and many an eye from omnibus and pavement rested gratefully on her fresh, trim presence as she passed young and erect, with the light of determination shining through the quiet self-possession of her face.  She was dressed as English girls do dress for town, without either coquetry or harshness:  her collarless blouse confessed a pretty neck, her eyes were bright and steady, and her dark hair waved loosely and graciously over her ears....