Yet, though his own impatient spirit had fared forth to meet her with this premature gift of his attributes, she had to fight the growing fear within her.  Now that the days of suffering were as they had not been, insistent questions dinned in her ears:  was she entitled to the joys to come?  What had she done to earn them?  Had hers not been an attempt, on a gigantic scale, to cheat the fates?  Nor could she say whether this feeling were a wholly natural failure to grasp a future too big, or the old sense of the unreality of events that had followed her so persistently.

The Hudson disappeared.  Factories, bridges, beflagged week-end resorts, ramshackle houses, and blocks of new buildings were scattered here and there.  The train was running on a causeway between miles of tenements where women and children, overtaken by lassitude, hung out of the windows:  then the blackness of the tunnel, and Honora closed her eyes.  Four minutes, three minutes, two minutes . . . .  The motion ceased.  At the steps of the car a uniformed station porter seized her bag; and she started to walk down the long, narrow platform.  Suddenly she halted.

“Drop anything, Miss?” inquired the porter.

“No,” answered Honora, faintly.  He looked at her in concern, and she began to walk on again, more slowly.

It had suddenly come over her that the man she was going to meet she scarcely knew!  Shyness seized her, a shyness that bordered on panic.  And what was he really like, that she should put her whole trust in him?  She glanced behind her:  that way was closed:  she had a mad desire to get away, to hide, to think.  It must have been an obsession that had possessed her all these months.  The porter was looking again, and he voiced her predicament.

“There’s only one way out, Miss.”

And then, amongst the figures massed behind the exit in the grill, she saw him, his face red-bronze with the sea tan, his crisp, curly head bared, his eyes alight with a terrifying welcome; and a tremor of a fear akin to ecstasy ran through her:  the fear of the women of days gone by whose courage carried them to the postern or the strand, and fainted there.  She could have taken no step farther—­and there was no need.  New strength flowed from the hand she held that was to carry her on and on.

He spoke her name.  He led her passive, obedient, through the press to the side street, and then he paused and looked into her burning face.

“I have you at last,” he said.  “Are you happy?”

“I don’t know,” she faltered.  “Oh, Hugh, it all seems so strange!  I don’t know what I have done.”

“I know,” he said exultantly; “but to save my soul I can’t believe it.”

She watched him, bewildered, while he put her maid into a cab, and by an effort roused herself.

“Where are you going, Hugh?”

“To get married,” he replied promptly.

She pulled down her veil.