"Frida," said the Colonel, "you are a fool." And for once Durant was inclined to agree with him. The more so as Miss Tancred took advantage of his engagement with his mackintosh to enthrone herself on the driver's high seat. She said good-by to the Colonel, and gathered up the reins; Miss Chatterton climbed up beside her; Polly gave a frantic plunge and a dash forward; and the hero was obliged to enter the dogcart after the deft fashion of a footman, with a run and a flying leap into the back seat. Miss Chatterton was unkind enough to laugh. "Well done!" said she. "Sit tight, and try to look as chivalrous as I'm sure you feel." But it is hard to look or feel chivalrous sitting on a back seat in a wet mackintosh with a thunderstorm pouring down your neck and into your ears, and a woman, possessed by all the devils, driving furiously to an express train that she can never catch. In that lunatic escape from Coton Manor she had not looked back once; she left Durant to contemplate a certain absurd little figure that stood under an immense Doris portico, regarding the face of the sky. The main thoroughfare of Whithorn-in-Arden was scored like the bed of a torrent, and fringed with an ochreish scum tossed up from the churning loam. The church clock struck three as they dashed through. "You'll never do it," said Durant; "it's a good twenty minutes from here." "In the brougham it is. Polly will do it in ten--with me driving her." She did it in seven. Durant had pictured the two ladies scurrying along the platform, and himself, a dismal figure, aiding their unlovely efforts to board a departing train; as it was, the three minutes saved allowed Frida to achieve her flight with dignity. For two out of those three minutes he stood outside their carriage window, beyond the shelter of the station roof, with the rain from the ornamental woodwork overflowing on to his innocent head. He was trying to smile. "Heroic," murmured Miss Chatterton; and her eyebrows intimated that she saw pathos in his appearance. As for Frida, her good-by was so curt and cold that Durant, who had suffered many things in redeeming the discourtesy of his former attitude to her, was startled and not a little hurt. His plain, lean face, that seemed to have grown still plainer and leaner under the lashing of the rain, set again in its habitual expression of repugnance; hers paled suddenly to a lighter sallow than before; the hand she had given to him withdrew itself in terror from his touch. He drew himself up stiffly, raising a hat that was no hat but a gutter, and the train crawled out of the station. He stood yet another minute staring at the naked rails, two shining parallel lines that seemed to touch and vanish, over the visible verge, into the gray fringe of the infinite where the rain washed out the world.