"To elope with Miss Tancred--run away with her--take her out of this. It's the only way." "The only way to what?" "To save her. But I shall do nothing rash, nothing that would cause a scandal in the county. I shall simply take her up to town with me when I go back on Monday. My week isn't up; but--well--my temper is. So far it's all open and aboveboard----" "Yes--yes. And where do I come in?" "Oh, _you_--if you wouldn't mind staying where you are and keeping the Colonel in play till we've got safe across the Channel----" "The Channel?" "The Channel, my friend. Where else should we be safe?" "That means that I've got to stick here till----" "Till Wednesday." "Good heavens! Another week! Not if I know it." "Yes; it's awful, I know; but not as bad as it might have been. You won't have to talk to Miss Tancred. By the way, she says you are the only man who ever tried to talk to her--to understand her. What a dreadful light on her past! Think what her life must have been." "Not very amusing, I imagine." "Amusing! _Think_ of it. Thirty years in this hole, where you can't breathe, and without a soul to speak to except the Colonel. Not that the Colonel is a soul--he's much too dense." "To be anything but a body?" "And all the time she has loathed it--loathed it. You see, she's got cosmopolitan blood in her veins. Her mother--you know about her mother?" "I know nothing about her except that she did a great many bad things--I mean pictures--for which I hope Heaven may forgive her." "Don't be brutal. She's dead now and can't do any more. When she was alive she was a Russian or a Pole or something funny, and mad on traveling, always going from one place to another--a regular rolling stone; till one day she rolled up to the Colonel's feet, and then----" "Well?" "He picked her up and put her in his pocket, and she never rolled any further. He packed her off to England and made her sit in this dreadful old family seat of his till she died of it. That's the sort of woman Miss Tancred's mother was, and Miss Tancred takes after her mother. She's a cosmopolitan, too." "Rubbish! No woman can be a cosmopolitan." He said it in the same tone in which he had told Frida that no woman could have a pure passion for Nature. "And Miss Tancred, though nice, strikes me as peculiarly provincial. I shouldn't have thought----" "There are things in her you'd never have thought of. It's wonderful how she comes out when you know her." "She certainly has come out wonderfully since you came on the scene." (The words he used had a familiar ring. It was exactly what Mrs. Fazakerly had said to him.) "I? I've not had anything to do with it. It was you; she told me. It wasn't just that you understood her; you made her understand herself; you made her feel; you stirred up all the passion in her." "I don't understand you," he said coldly. "Well, I think if you can understand Miss Tancred you might understand _me_. Compared with Frida I'm simplicity itself."