cleared up, we’ve got to face this trouble separately.”

“No! No! No!” she exclaimed, looking up eagerly, piteously, into his drawn face. “Not separately, but together, Harry.”

And it was he, not she, who broke down as she pressed up closer to him, for, to her agonized distress, he pushed her away and broke into short, gasping, hard sobs.

“I can’t come back to the house,” he said at last. “Tell your uncle I’ll meet him at the station, my darling.”

She saw he was making a great effort over himself, and very gallantly she “played up.”

“All right, I’ll tell him. But Harry?”

“Yes?” he said listlessly.

“You’ll go now and get something to eat. Promise?” and for the first time her lips quivered.

“I promise.”

Again he took her in his arms. Their lips met and clung together. At last, “Oh, Jean,” he whispered brokenly, “do you think we shall ever be happy again?”

“Of course we shall,” she said confidently.

And then she walked with him through the wintry, bare garden to the field where there was a gate which gave into the road leading to Grendon. There they did not kiss again. They only shook hands quietly.

85

CHAPTER VIII

The scene shifts to London—London, so indifferent, so cruel, so drab a city to those whom she is stranger, not mother.

Harry Garlett and Dr. Maclean had gone to a city hotel where they felt sure that they would run little risk of meeting any one from their part of the world.

And it was there, within sound of what he vaguely felt to be the comforting roar of London’s busiest traffic, that Garlett paced up and down a big private sitting room in the cold, foggy atmosphere of a December afternoon, while he waited for the doctor’s return from the Criminal Investigation Department of the Home Office.

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