Bushwick was gathering the prostrate figure up. “She has fainted!” he called. “Get some water, somebody!” XIX. The early Monday morning train which brought Verrian up to town was so very early that he could sit down to breakfast with his mother only a little later than their usual hour. She had called joyfully to him from her room, when she heard the rattling of his key as he let himself into the apartment, and, after an exchange of greetings, shouted back and forth before they saw each other, they could come at once to the history of his absence over their coffee. “You must have had a very good time, to stay so long. After you wrote that you would not be back Thursday, I expected it would be Saturday till I got your telegram. But I’m glad you stayed. You certainly needed the rest.” “Yes, if those things are ever a rest.” He looked down at his cup while he stirred the coffee in it, and she studied his attitude, since she could not see his face fully, for the secret of any vital change that might have come upon him. It could be that in the interval since she had seen him he had seen the woman who was to take him from her. She was always preparing herself for that, knowing that it must come almost as certainly as death, and knowing that with all her preparation she should not be ready for it. “I’ve got rather a long story to tell you and rather a strange story,” he said, lifting his head and looking round, but not so impersonally that his mother did not know well enough to say to the Swedish serving-woman: “You needn’t stay, Margit. I’ll give Mr. Philip his breakfast. Well!” she added, when they were alone. “Well,” he returned, with a smile that she knew he was forcing, “I have seen the girl that wrote that letter.” “Not Jerusha Brown?” “Not Jerusha Brown, but the girl all the same.” “Now go on, Philip, and don’t miss a single word!” she commanded him, with an imperious breathlessness. “You know I won’t hurry you or interrupt you, but you must--you really must-tell me everything. Don’t leave out the slightest detail.” “I won’t,” he said. But she was aware, from time to time, that she was keeping her word better than he was keeping his, in his account of meeting Miss Shirley and all the following events. “You can imagine,” he said, “what a sensation the swooning made, and the commotion that followed it.” “Yes, I can imagine that,” she answered. But she was yet so faithful that she would not ask him to go on. He continued, unasked, “I don’t know just how, now, to account for its coming into my head that it was Miss Andrews who was my unknown correspondent. I suppose I’ve always unconsciously expected to meet that girl, and Miss Andrews’s hypothetical case was psychologically so parallel--” “Yes, yes!” “And I’ve sometimes been afraid that I judged it too harshly--that it was a mere girlish freak without any sort of serious import.” “I was sometimes afraid so, Philip. But--”