"Well, good-bye and God bless you, my boy! Remember there'll always be one man in the old country that wants you. I'd sooner die than have that new man poking round me. I'll send for old Tom Tamplin, hanged if I don't." Wulfrey rode on to the Hall. "Going away, Wulf? Where to and for how long?" asked Elinor, anxious and troubled. "That depends. I've not been up to the mark lately and a good long change will set me up." "But you will come back?" "I have really no plans made, except to get away for a time and see a bit of the outside world." "I was hoping ... you would stop and ... sometime, perhaps..." and the small white hands clasped and unclasped nervously, as was her way when her mind was upset. "The change I am sure will be good for me. And you are quite all right again. You are looking better than I've seen you for a long time past." "I'm all right," she said drearily, "except that I have bad dreams now and again. I cannot be quite sure in my own mind----" "Now, now!"--shaking a peremptory finger at her. "That is all past and done with. Bad dreams are forbidden, remember!" "I can't help their coming. They come in spite of all my trying at times. And they are always the same. I see Pasley lying on the bed, raging and cursing, and ordering me to go and get him----" "It's only a dream of a dream. I was hoping you had quite got the better of it. You must fight against it. Now I must run. Got a lot of things to do yet, and I'm off first thing in the morning. Good-bye, Elinor,--and all happiness to you!" BOOK II NO MAN'S LAND XII Wulfrey Dale, as he strolled about the Liverpool docks and basins, felt very much like a schoolboy who had run away from home in search of the wide free life of the Rover of the Seas. He had, however, one vast advantage over the runaway, in that he had money in his pocket and could pick and choose, and there was no angry master or troubled parent on his track to haul him back to bondage. He had no slightest regrets in the matter. Under all the circumstances of the case, he said to himself, he could have done nothing else. Elinor, left to herself, would undoubtedly have paid with her life, either on the gallows or in a mad-house, and that was unthinkable. The inexorable Law would have taken no account of the true inwardness of the case. He had saved her because he understood, and because the alternatives had been too dreadful to think of. As to the cost to himself,--the long blue-green heave of the sea, out there beyond the point, made little of that, changed it indeed from one side of the account to the other, and presented it, not as a loss, but as very substantial gain.