To tell her everything at the moment when the yacht had swung back and he had thrown up his commission forever had been his first strong impulse. He had crushed it down only because he saw that to speak then was to take her at an ungenerous disadvantage. Now Fortune had sent him this new meeting, to be untrammeled by any such restraints. No grim duty governed his movements now; no consciousness of secret chicanery any longer enfolded him like a pall. Already the thought of what he had meant to do came back to him hazily, like the plot of a half-forgotten play. The hobgoblins in a nightmare seemed not more unreal to him now. His heart sang with the knowledge that he was to see her again, this time with no shadow between. Two nights' rain had left the road dustless: it was silent and empty. All about him fell the pleasant evening noises of the wood, but he did not hear them. As he walked, his mind was rehearsing the whole story of his coming to Hunston, as he was now free to confess it to Uncle Elbert's daughter. That she would forgive him he never entertained a doubt. For he would throw himself wholly on her mercy--telling her everything, painting himself as blackly as he could--and suing for pardon only because he had failed. But when suddenly he saw her, sooner than he had expected, his polished and elaborate phrases dropped from his mind as cleanly as had the recollection of the roguery of Higginson. It was at that hour when the skies remember the set sun in a gold and pink glow. A little kink in the road straightened out under his swift feet, and a small cottage in a fair-sized lawn jumped out of the woods into vision, almost upon him. On the small square porch, her back to the road, stood Miss Carstairs, talking through the open window to some one in the room beyond. Varney, having stopped short at the first sudden sight of her, walked on very slowly. Her voice came to him distinctly, and now and then he caught scattering words of what she was saying. She wore her blue dress of the luncheon and the hat which Mrs. Marne, and others, had so admired; and she gave him the odd impression of being somehow _older_ than she had ever seemed before.... Yet she was ten years his junior and three days ago, at this very hour, he had never so much as laid eyes upon her. "I'll come Saturday morning, then," she was saying, "and you'll certainly have them ready for me, won't you? Good-bye." She turned from the window, came towards the steps. At the top of them, she saw Varney standing at the gate, not twenty yards away, and stopped dead. Then she came on down the stairs, down the graveled walk towards him. "I'm going away at eight o'clock," he began without greeting, striving to make his voice casual. "I went to your house first--and--" "You--followed me here?" "Yes," he said, unsmiling. "I had to see you before I went--on matters of business--and--"