Frida had said, "We sail to-morrow"; therefore, Durant walked all the way to Whithorn-in-Arden to post his letter, so that it might reach her before she left London. And as he came back across the dewy path in the dim light, and Coton Manor raised its forehead from the embrace of the woods and opened the long line of its dull windows, he realized all that it had done for Frida. He understood the abnegation and the tragedy of her life. She had been sacrificed, not only to her father, but to her father's fetish, the property; Coton Manor had to be kept up at all costs, and the cost had been Frida's, it had been her mother's. The place had crushed and consumed her spirit, as it swallowed up two-thirds of her material inheritance; it had made the living woman as the dead. He remembered how the house had been called her mother's monument, and how it had become her own grave. Her soul had never lived there. And now that she was gone it was as empty as the tomb from which the soul has lifted the body at resurrection time. And he, too, was set at liberty. He left by the slow early train on Wednesday without waiting for the afternoon express, his object being not so much to reach town as to get away from Coton Manor. The Colonel accompanied him to the station; and, to his infinite surprise and embarrassment, he found Mrs. Fazakerly on the platform waiting to see him off. He could think of nothing nice to say to her about her engagement, not even when she took possession of him with a hand on his arm, led him away to the far end of the platform, and gazed expectantly into his face. "You don't congratulate me, Mr. Durant." "On what?" he asked moodily. "On having done a good deed." "A good deed?" "Didn't I tell you there was nothing I wouldn't do for Frida Tancred?" Incomparable cunning! To set herself right in his eyes and her own, she was trying to persuade him that she had accepted the Colonel for his daughter's sake. A good deed! Well, whatever else she had done, and whatever her motives may have been, the deed remained; she had set Frida Tancred free. Nevertheless, he could not be pleasant. "Self-sacrifice, no doubt, is a virtue," said he; "yet one draws the line----" "Does one?" He felt a delicate pressure on his arm, the right touch, the light touch. "Mr. Durant, you are dense, and you are ungrateful." "I don't see it." "Don't you see what I have done for you?" There was a strange light behind the _pince-nez_ as she smiled up into his face. "I have cleared the way." "For Miss Tancred, you mean," said Durant; thereby proving that in her calculations as to his mean density Mrs. Fazakerly was not altogether wrong. But Durant was always an imaginative man. And as he sped on the same journey over the same rails, his imagination followed Frida Tancred in her flight toward freedom and the unknown. THE COSMOPOLITAN PART II OUTWARD BOUND XIV