But when he heard her footsteps again they were not returning. They passed along to the kitchen; she was speaking to Mrs. Barker--Gregory had a shoot of surface thought for Mrs. Barker's astonishment; they entered the hall again, the hall door closed behind them. Gregory stood looking at the Bouddha. The tears kept mounting to his throat and eyes and, furiously, he choked them back. He did not see the Bouddha. But, suddenly becoming aware of the bland contemplative gaze of the great bronze image, his eyes fixed themselves on it. He had known it from the first to be an enemy. Its presage was fulfilled. The tidal wave had broken over his life. PART II CHAPTER XXIX Karen sat in her corner of the railway carriage looking out at familiar scenery. Reading and the spring-tide beauties of the Thames valley had gone by in the morning. Then, after the attendant had passed along the corridor announcing lunch, and those who were lunching had followed him in single file, had come the lonely majesty of the Somerset downs, lying like great headlands along the plain, a vast sky of rippled blue and silver above them. They had passed Plymouth where she had always used to look down from the high bridges and wonder over the lives of the midshipmen on the training-ships, and now they were winding through wooded Cornish valleys. Karen had looked out of her window all day. She had not read, though kind Frau Lippheim had put the latest _tendenz-roman_, paper-bound, into the little basket, which was also stocked with stout beef-sandwiches, a bottle of milk, and the packet of chocolate and bun in paper bag that Franz had added to it at the station. Poor Franz. He and his mother had come to see her off and they had both wept as the train moved away, and strange indeed it must have been for them to see the Karen Jardine who, only yesterday, had been, apparently, so happy, and so secure in her new life, carried back to the old; a wife who had left her husband. Karen had slept little the night before, and kind Franz must have slept less; for he had given her his meagre bedroom and spent the night on the narrowest, hardest, most slippery of sofas in the sitting-room of the Bayswater lodging-house where Karen had found the Lippheims very cheaply, very grimly, not to say greasily, installed. It was no wonder that Franz's eyes had been so heavy, his face so puffed and pale that morning; and his tears had given the last touch of desolation to his countenance. Karen herself had not wept, either at the parting or at the meeting of the night before. She had told them, with no explanations at all, that she had left her husband and was going back to her guardian, and the Lippheims had asked no questions.