It did come at last. It made only a very brief stoppage at that small junction. There was an empty first-class compartment, into which the travellers got. At the last moment, as Hamilton, standing with bared head, looked at Fulvia and wished her good-bye, without even holding out his hand to intrude upon her grief, she roused for a moment, held out hers with an impulsive movement, and said: ‘Good-bye, Mr. Hamilton. You have been a true friend to me to-day. I’ll never forget it.’ ‘Then say “a rivederci,”’ he besought her, with a sudden change of expression. ‘Willingly--in a happier hour, if one should come to me--a rivederci.’ He clasped her hand, and looked into her eyes, and dropped from the footboard, as the train was in motion. Soon it was out of sight. As he turned again to the outside of the station, the fleeting glory of that sunrise was over. The heaven was gray; every splendour had departed. From the leaden sky, a drizzling rain had begun to fall into a slate-coloured sea which moaned and growled like the ‘fierce old mother’ that she was. Hamilton collected all the rugs and shawls, folded them neatly into a bundle, and covered them up with a mackintosh. One he reserved to fold round his own knees as he drove back, in the teeth of a raw wind which not even August could make warm. His face was as gray as the day; his thoughts resembled both. ‘So! She is gone! And gone for what, and to what? If only that d----l would die! But he won’t. I wonder what happened--I wonder what drove her to this? Something horrible, I haven’t a doubt--not a doubt! Oh, Lord, what a world it is--what a world! And how we are handicapped who have scruples about playing off our own bat and letting all the rest go hang. Hans didn’t mind, and so perhaps she is lost to me for ever.’ It was seven o’clock when he drove into the stableyard of his sister’s house, and confronted the astonished youth who was Minna’s only man-servant, and whom horror and amaze at what he believed to have been the stealing of the property committed to his charge had reduced to such a state of imbecility that its reappearance only served to more thoroughly bewilder and terrify him. Hamilton threw the reins to him, bade him look to the horse, and went into the house, leaving him to recover as best he might from his stupor. CHAPTER XXV.