She would put her white arms about his neck, and her lips would cling to his. When the thought came, a flash of passion irradiated the whole man. He never doubted that he would win her. She loved him. The letter which he had read over a thousand times was overwhelming evidence. Her hurried flight from London also testified to the seriousness of the blow the discovery had been to her. He conjured up scenes and incidents in their past intercourse whose significance, unnoticed at the time, became sweetly plain in the light of his new knowledge. Nothing could stand in his way now. He was going to her, not a broken man humiliated with failure, as he had done on the last occasion he had sought her, but proud with name and fame, and the promise of great power in the land. He had not written to her. His imagination was too much fired with the idea he had conceived of bursting upon her suddenly with the news of his freedom and with a passionate appeal. The vividness and excitement of the past few days had awakened the theatrical element in his nature--the dramatic instinct that lies in the nature of any great orator and leader of men. “_Lyons, dix minutes d’arrêt!_” Goddard left the compartment to stretch his legs. The great station loomed vast in the darkness of the mid-January morning. The tapping of the wheels echoed ghostly in the stillness. Only a few muffled forms had braved the cold, and were stamping their feet on the platform, or hurrying to the dimly lit buffet for the morning coffee. Nothing more delicious than this in the sweet spring dawn, but at five o’clock in mid-winter it requires an effort to leave the snugness of the compartment. To Goddard the journey was half dream, half delight. The great train, standing, to his English eyes, monstrously high above the rails, seemed some strange engine appointed by fate to his service. It seemed symbolic of the irresistible force that he had at his command.