"When will it be--that we must go?" Karen then, more faintly, asked. Madame von Marwitz had risen to her feet. In her ecstasy of gladness she could have clapped her hands above her head and danced. And the strong control she put upon herself gave to her face almost the grimace of a child that masters its weeping. She was drawn from her well. She stood upon firm ground. "In two days, my child, if you are strong enough. In two days we will set sail." "In two days," Karen repeated. And, dully, she repeated again; "I come with you in two days." Madame von Marwitz now noticed that tears ran from under the hand. These tears of Karen's alarmed her. She had not wept at all before to-day. "My child is worn and tired. She would rest. Is it not so? Shall I leave her?" she leaned above the girl to ask. "Yes; I am tired," said Karen. And leaning there, above the hidden face, above the heart wrung with its secret agony, in all her ecstasy and profound relief, Madame von Marwitz knew one of the bitterest moments of her life. She had gained safety. But what was her loss, her irreparable loss? In the dark little staircase she leaned, as on the day of her coming, against the wall, and murmured, as she had murmured then: "_Bon Dieu! Bon Dieu!_" But the words were broken by the sobs that, now uncontrollably, shook her as she stumbled on in the darkness. CHAPTER XLV Some years had passed since Mrs. Talcott had been in London, and it seemed to her, coming up from her solitudes, noisier, more crowded, more oppressive than when she had seen it last. She had a jaded yet an acute eye for its various aspects, as she drove from Paddington towards St. James's, and a distaste, born of her many years of life in cities, took more definite shape in her, even while the excitement of the movement and uproar accompanied not inappropriately the strong impulses that moved her valorous soul. Mrs. Talcott wore a small, round, black straw hat trimmed with a black bow. It was the shape that she had worn for years; it was unaffected by the weather and indifferent to the shifting of fashion. Her neck-gear was the one invariable with her in the daytime; a collar of lawn turned down over a black silk stock. About her shoulders was a black cloth cape. Sitting there in her hansom, she looked very old, and she looked also very national and typical; the adventurous, indomitable old girl of America, bent on seeing all that there was to see, emerged for the first time in her life from her provinces, and carrying, it might have been, a Baedeker under her arm. It was many years since Mrs. Talcott had passed beyond the need of Baedekers, and her provinces were a distant memory; yet she, too, was engaged, like the old American girl, in the final adventure of her life. She did not know, as she drove along in her hansom with her shabby little box on the roof, whether she were ever to see Les Solitudes again.