Far from regretting his marriage, Owen merely regretted Toni's unreasonableness in the matter of Miss Loder; and once that young woman was removed from the scene, Owen had no doubt that he and his wife would shake down again quite comfortably and forget the recent scenes between them. But Toni, who always meant exactly what she said, and unconsciously expected the same sincerity of speech from others, had taken Owen literally; and although for a moment a flood of human weakness had overtaken her as she gazed at Leonard Dowson's firm signature, she never really faltered in her purpose. When she had read the fatal letter once more, she went back into the house, and there she burned the document with almost mechanical forethought. Then she went upstairs to her room and carefully packed her dressing-bag. She did not take very much. Somehow it seemed unnecessary to burden herself with many things; and when she had finished her packing and had hidden the bag in her capacious wardrobe, she went downstairs and sat by the drawing-room fire to wait until Kate saw fit to bring tea. When, at the usual time, Kate entered, she moved across the room to light the lamps; but Toni sent her away with this part of her duty undone. To-night Toni wished to sit in the firelight. The fog had thickened in the last hour, and now it pressed against the windows like a chill, ghostly presence, hiding the garden, the river, the trees in thick and clammy folds. Looking across the room from her seat by the fire Toni shivered; and it seemed unkind of Fate to ordain that her last memories of Greenriver should be shrouded in the cold and creeping mist. She turned back to the fire with a shiver; and sat gazing into the leaping flames, while her tea grew cold and the hands of the clock crept inexorably onwards. At half-past five she must leave the house. True, the meeting-place was distant barely a quarter of a mile, but Owen might return early, and she had no desire to run the risk of meeting him. A short cut over the fields would both shorten the way and minimize the danger of running into her husband; and Toni looked up, startled, when the silver clock on the mantelpiece chimed the hour of five. Only thirty minutes, and her life at Greenriver would come to an end. Never again would she roam through the beautiful old house, never sit in this charming, panelled room, with its ghostly yet alluring fragrance as of bygone lavender and roses. Never again would she wander in the garden, revelling in the beauties of colour and scent and form which made so lovely a picture in the glorious setting of turf and river. Never again would she stroll beneath the tall trees in the summer dusk, while the owls hooted eerily and the nightingale murmured luscious love-songs to the dreaming roses. The river would know her no more; never again would her feet tread the towing-path where in the early morning she had been used to saunter, with her faithful Jock by her side----