But she was not unhappy. Beneath the senseless whirring of her fatigue there was the knowledge of Pender’s coming. It had been there hidden all day, unexamined, yet making life endurable. And now it rose and rose, till all her consciousness was suffused with it. Again and again she looked at the watch on her wrist, the little gold watch with its Milanese plaited strap which Mario had given her. “By now,” she thought, “his train has passed Carlisle.” “Perhaps he is drinking tea in the restaurant car.” (As she pictured him she could see exactly, though she had never in his presence consciously noticed it, the peculiar way in which his square fingers grasped the handle of a cup, and the strong curve of his wrist as the sleeve slipped back a little.) “By now he must be very near Glasgow.” “He must be gathering up his things.” “Now, if he has come at all, he has certainly arrived.” “Even if the train is later than it ever is, he must be here.” “Will Mildred meet him, as he is going at first to stay with her?” “Or will he leave the station alone in a cab?” “How long will he stay at Panmure Crescent before going to the studio-cottage Mildred is so proud of having found for him at Carmunnock?”

But what did any of these things matter? Nothing! It only mattered that after so many weeks he was already here. That at this very moment he was in Glasgow. That he was breathing the same air that she breathed. That some day soon she would see his square-fingered hands, and feel his strange, prominent eyes upon her.

CHAPTER FOUR

I

Exactly four weeks later, at much the same hour of the day (although, the spring being further advanced, the sky had not yet begun to make its preparations for sunset), anyone walking across the summit of Garnethill would have noticed a man who waited at the street’s highest point. Further, anyone of the smallest experience would have known that this man waited there for a woman. In his thick, buttoned-up, dark grey overcoat, he stood in the middle of the roadway, disdaining criticism and both pavements, and now and then with a movement half nervous and half defiant he adjusted his soft, light grey hat to an even jauntier angle. He wore gloves and carried a stick. His very outline against the sky was suggestive of gallantry.