“How I shall love her; how I shall love her!” said the girl, with a little rush of happy tears; then she laughed aloud in her happiness, and, catching sight of the station at last, quickened her steps, until she was almost running when she finally entered it. Going up to the ticket office, she purchased her ticket. “Have to change at Morecome Junction,” said the clerk, in answer to her query; “and if you catch the connection, you ought to be at Crumplesea about six-forty. If you miss it, you’ll have to stop at Morecome the night; there’s no other trains to Crumplesea until the morning. Train for Morecome’s coming in now. “Number four platform--and you’ll have to step lively if you want to catch it.” “Thank you,” said Dora, as she gathered up her ticket and the change. In another moment, she was flying down the stairs to the train and to the beginning of the strange new life that lay before her. CHAPTER XLIV. THE MEETING. For once, in a way, fortune favored Dora. She managed to catch the connecting train at Morecome Junction, and, as a consequence, arrived at Crumplesea--tired and dusty, but still full of enthusiasm--at a quarter to seven that same evening. It was the night of the opening of the Crumplesea Opera House, and she found the whole town placarded with gaudy posters of “The Beauty of Gotham”--glaring, highly colored things, depicting women with impossible tresses of an impossible shade of yellow, frisking about in skirts above their knees. But in that first glance she had seen the name, “Miss Rosalind Montague-Vance,” emblazoned over the boldest and the most conspicuous of them all, and she had felt an added shame because of that. Not that she had any idea that the bearer of it could be in any way, even the remotest, connected with herself--for there were hundreds of “Vances” in the world; even Miss Skimmers having had more than one of them enrolled among her pupils in Dora’s time--but that the knowledge of there being a woman bearing a name the same as her own, who could let her pictures be shown in public, made the shame of it seem a personal matter. “How it must shock poor little mother, if she has seen it, too,” she said to herself. “Fancy having one’s name flaunted about by a creature like that, and in the very town where one lives! It must be awful.” The change of the five-pound note that had been sent her was still in her pocket--there had not been time to stop anywhere and buy the new frock she had been told to do--and hastily summoning a cabman to her aid, she gave him the necessary directions, and was soon speeding away to Minorca Villa with her shabby old valise on the top of the vehicle.