But she had already gathered her cloak about her and held it tightly with one hand under her chin.

“It’s all right, Wolf! It’s all right!” she said quickly, turning as if with a swift impulse for flight towards the hedge.

“It would be mad now, I suppose,” he thought, as he followed her through the entangled branches.

Half-an-hour later, and he was walking with a rapid, preoccupied step along the lighted pavement of the Blacksod High Street. His head was so full of Christie, as he strode along, that the people he passed were as much phantoms to him as had been the elm-trees on the road from King’s Barton.

Christie had agreed to come on Monday. That was what he was thinking about now; and it was an imaginary dialogue with Gerda, dealing with this project, that he was now occupied in rehearsing, sentence by sentence, as he hurried along.