We reached Waterloo at last, and my driver called a porter and asked him to attend to me. Then he drove off instantly, and not until afterwards did I remember that he had gone without even asking for his fare. The porter escorted me to the right platform, but there we found a train to Wildacre had just gone, and there would be no other for thirty-five minutes. I sat down in my wet things upon a bench, and waited with feverish impatience, whilst the clock overhead lagged through the interminable minutes. Then what D’Arcy had said came true. Strange horrible men came up and spoke to me. I sat mute, and answered never a word, and my heart sickened with longing for Felix. The porter came for me when the time was up, and put me into the train, and smiled gratefully at me when I gave him half-a-crown. All through the journey to Wildacre I sat in a kind of stupor, only waking from it when people got in and out at the stations, or when a train whizzed past on its way up to London. Then came the drive up the hill and across the common. It was very cold on the common. The rain had now ceased to fall, and the wind cut my face like a knife, but I was too weary to pull up the cab windows. By the little sunken fence I dismissed the cab, and walked in the darkness across the lawn to the honeysuckle porch. A flood of light greeted me as I opened the door, and Anne Gillotson rushed out of the dining-room looking white and agitated. “Oh! I _am_ glad to see you safely back again, Miss,” she said. “It is going on for ten o’clock, and I have been so anxious about you ever since it became dark. Mr. Felix Gray has been here. He arrived about nine o’clock, but when he found you were out he did not stay.” I stood still in the hall, and a deadly sick feeling came over me. “Did he ask where I was?” I managed to say. “Yes, Miss. Oh, please don’t look like that,” replied Anne, almost weeping. “I hope you’ll forgive me, but he was so stern and asked such sharp questions I was obliged to tell him.” “You told him——?” “I told him that you had said you were going to spend the day with an old schoolfellow who was staying near here.” “And then?” “Oh, dear! Miss, I am more vexed than I can say that it should have happened, for he looked in a dreadful way and went straight out at the door. I begged him to wait, but he said there would be no use in waiting. Then he changed his mind and came in again, and said he’d leave a note for you. I got him pen and paper and he wrote a short note. ‘Give her this,’ he said, ‘when she returns, if she ever does return.’ Then he went away. He has not been gone half an hour, Miss, if you’d only been a little bit earlier you’d have caught him. My dear, how wet you are, and how white you look; what does it all mean?” “Where is the note?” I gasped. She went into the dining-room and brought it out to me. I tore it open. There were but two words written on the paper: “Good-bye, Rosamund.”