Geoff went down to the City without loss of a moment. He secured berths in a steamer which was to sail in three days; and with a bound of pleasure and conscious pride in his heart found himself engaged for his passage across the Atlantic. He went home very soberly, but with the blood coursing in his veins. He had taken such an initiative now as he had never been able to take in all his life before. He had emancipated himself at last. It was, however, with a little apprehension that he turned homeward. Whether his mother would impede his way with weeping, whether the sisters would reject his escort, he could not tell; but his fears in both cases were unnecessary. Mrs Underwood had been reduced to subjection some time before he got home. And as for Grace and Milly, they were neither excited about his proposal nor disposed to refuse it. They took it as the most natural thing in the world. There was a gleam of brightness, he thought, in Milly’s face, but Grace paid very little attention. Geoffrey was a little cast down when he perceived that they saw nothing at all heroic in his mission, nothing that anybody would think twice about. But he had to console himself with Miss Anna’s declaration that a fortnight on board ship would settle all questions. He himself felt a great confidence that everything would come right in the end. Thus the difficulty was brought to a conclusion, in a way little contemplated by the Canadian who once had been Leonard Crosthwaite, and had broken his heart for his cousin Anna. When the young people were gone, the two ladies from Grove Road made a little pilgrimage to the great, grey, dismal London cemetery in which all that remained of him lay--where Mrs Underwood laid some flowers, and Anna gazed with eyes that looked as if they could penetrate the very secrets of the grave, upon the mound under which the lover of her youth slept in peace. What were the thoughts that had lain concealed within his breast for thirty years, yet which had brought him, carrying fear and confusion which he little anticipated, to her dwelling, the first day he spent in England, no one could tell. He had carried all that mystery with him to the other world.