Kate had never gone anywhere alone before. She was nothing but one big beating heart, beating so that the little body that contained it could scarcely breathe, when she slipped down the back-stairs and out at the side-door. She put on a great waterproof cloak, one of those garments which are next thing to the domino of the drama as a means of disguise, and a black hat, and a great veil tied over her face as fashion permits. A mask could not have been a greater protection. She was, indeed, masked from head to foot, and except by her gait or outline of her figure could not have been recognised. It seemed to her as if the beating of her heart must have been heard through all the house, bringing everybody out to see what such a noise meant; but it was not so. In her proper person, and with her pretty face open to the light, Kate Crediton was as courageous as any girl could be, and that is saying a great deal; but masked and cloaked as she was, and running away, she was all over abject terror. She trembled when the railway porter came to tell her about the train; her voice was scarcely audible when she got her ticket; she shrank away to the farthest corner, and hid herself for the few horrible moments that she had to wait. And no words can express the sense of guilt and fear and forlorn loneliness with which she contemplated all the varieties of the journey which she had undertaken. To get out of the carriage by herself at Camelford, to steal across the crowded railway station, a little shrinking black figure in the lamplight, to take another ticket, and have herself put into another train, and then to look forward to the long walk in the dark, the country road, the stillness and loneliness and suspicious looks of everybody who should meet her! Her own opinion was that two or three times over she had nearly died of it; and, to tell the truth, she was not far wrong. The weather had grown milder, but she shivered in her excitement; and it was very cloudy and damp, with occasional showers, and little light in the pale sky. How was she to do it? And what reception was she likely to meet with at the end? And her father, what would his feelings be? All these things seized upon Kate, and caught her in their clutches, and hung about her like ghosts as she pursued her lonely journey. Sometimes her natural courage made an effort to assert itself, but the courage of a girl of nineteen is but little able to sustain her under the sense of secrecy and flight and loneliness and the darkest of country roads.