She was coming casually out of the tea-room, carrying a handbag, just like anybody else. That mystical perversity of his mind, which had insisted on sealing up the sacred memory like something hardly to be sought in mere curiosity, had fixed it in its original colours and setting, like something of which no detail could be changed without the vision dissolving. He would have conceived it almost impossible that she could appear in anything but white or out of anything but a wood. And he found himself turned topsy-turvy by an old and common incredulity of men in his condition; being startled by the coincidence that blue suited her as well as white; and that in what he remembered of that woodland there was something else; something to be said even for teashops and railway stations. She stopped in front of him and her pale, fluttering eyelids lifted from her blue-grey eyes. “Why,” she said, “you are the boy that jumped in the river!” “I’m no longer a boy,” answered Hood, “but I’m ready to jump in the river again.” “Well, don’t jump on the railway-line,” she said, as he turned with a swiftness suggestive of something of the kind. “To tell you the truth,” he said, “I was thinking of jumping into your railway-train. Do you mind if I jump into your railway-train?” “Well, I’m going to Birkstead,” she said rather doubtfully. Mr. Owen Hood did not in the least care where she was going, as he had resolved to go there; but as a matter of fact, he remembered a wayside station on that line that lay very near to what he had in view; so he tumbled into the carriage if possible with more alacrity; and landscapes shot by them as they sat looking in a dazed and almost foolish fashion at each other. At last the girl smiled with a sense of the absurdity of the thing. “I heard about you from a friend of yours,” she said; “he came to call on us soon after it happened; at least that was when he first came. You know Dr. Hunter, don’t you?” “Yes,” replied Owen, a shadow coming over his shining hour. “Do you--do you know him well?” “I know him pretty well now,” said Miss Elizabeth Seymour. The shadow on his spirit blackened swiftly; he suspected something quite suddenly and savagely. Hunter, in Crane’s old phrase, was not a man who let the grass grow under his feet. It was so like him to have somehow used the incident as an introduction to the Seymours. Things were always stepping-stones for Hunter, and the little rock in the river had been a stepping-stone to the country house. But was the country house a stepping-stone to something else? Suddenly Hood realized that all his angers had been very abstract angers. He had never hated a man before. At that moment the train stopped at the station of Cowford. “I wish you’d get out here with me,” he said abruptly, “only for a little--and it might be the last time. I want you to do something.” She looked at him with a curious expression and said in a rather low voice, “What do you want me to do?”