"I will come down to the drawing-room," she said, scarcely knowing herself why she came to this decision; coming to it more by instinct, than by any power of reasoning. She paused yet another moment to collect her forces, then went slowly down the great staircase, and opened the drawing-room door, without lingering on the threshold, as she was more than half inclined to do. Fergusson came forward quickly to greet her, and she saw that, though he smiled, and spoke in his customary, cheery manner, his eyes held a troubled look, and there was a worn expression on his face, which she had never seen there before. His manner, too, had a nervousness very foreign to it, and he talked rapidly, as though he were afraid of silence, and must continue speaking at all costs. "I must apologise for troubling you," he said, and Cicely noted the formality of his speech, "but I felt I should like to come and ask about my little friend Baba, before I go away." "Go away?" Cicely could frame no other words than those two bare ones, because for a second her heart seemed to stop beating, then raced on again at headlong speed. "Yes"--Fergusson still spoke fast and nervously,--"I have come to rather a sudden decision, but I feel it is a wise one. I have made up my mind to go abroad, to begin life in a new country. The old one is over-crowded--we are all finding that fact out more and more, and I am proposing to go to the Far West. It has always appealed to me--that free life in a big, new country." "But your poor people--your people in South London," Cicely interrupted, a sick pain gnawing at her heart; "surely they want you?" He shrugged his shoulders a little, and smiled. "I am not indispensable to them, or to anyone"--the last words he spoke under his breath--"and I believe there is plenty of work waiting for me, on the other side of the world. I have not made up my mind to this hurriedly, but it seems the best and wisest thing to do." "I wonder why?" Cicely began slowly, her blue eyes looking full into those troubled brown ones. "It seems"--she broke off, leaving her sentence unfinished, her eyes dropping suddenly, because of what she read in those other eyes. "Does it seem to you a mad idea?--an act of impulse?" he asked, his glance travelling hungrily over her down-bent face. "I have not come to the decision impulsively. It is the best--the only thing to do." The last part of the speech dropped hurriedly from his lips, he drew in his breath sharply, almost as if he were being tried to the limits of his strength. "I--could not--go away without coming to say good-bye to you--and Miss Moore--and Baba," he added jerkily.