"Virtually engaged!" corrected Bedford quietly. "But they were sad thoughts to judge by your face. Why should you have sad thoughts of a good man? It would hurt him to have you think of him so, for of a certainty his chief thought is for your happiness. Shall we dismiss him for the moment?--It's lonely for me here by myself, when you wander away into dreams, and you look so wraith-like and unreal,--a typical spirit of the mist. If I were an artist I should like to paint you now. I wonder if you realise how beautiful you are?" A glow lighted Katrine's eyes; the glow which warms the heart of every true daughter of Eve who hears herself called fair. "Am I? I'm glad! I--I think I've grown nicer lately," she replied ingenuously. "At home no one admired me much; not half, not a quarter as much as they did Grizel, who is really hardly pretty at all. She used to laugh at me in the old days and say that I kept my good looks a secret, while she took people by the throat, and bullied them into admiration, but the last time she came down she said--?" "Yes?" "She said I had grown `unnecessarily good looking!' and wanted to know `_Why_?' I knew!" Katrine laughed guiltily. "But I couldn't explain. So I was _cross_." Bedford looked at her searchingly. For a moment he seemed on the point of repeating Grizel's question, but he checked himself. "You shan't be cross, and you shan't be sad, so long as I am here to manage for you!" he said confidently, and Katrine, looking at his broad shoulders and grave, purposeful face, felt with a thrill that no harm could indeed approach while this strong man was near. The dank breath of the fog increased with every moment, driving the passengers into the brightly-lighted saloon, but to Katrine there was a glorious exhilaration in the darkness and the solitude. She realised that in time to come she would look back upon these moments, and treasure them in her heart. When her only meetings with Bedford should be in the crowded festivities of the little station, the isolation of this hour in the fog would live enshrined in memory, to be recalled with a passion of longing.