'WHEN THE

A

S THE train began to move, and Liverpool Street station slipped back-back-back, Grace sprang to her feet in the middle of the carriage. It was reserved; Douglas had taken care of that. When you are eloping with another man's wife, it is the least you can do.

"Douglas, we're running away-running away!" she cried out, balancing by the hat-rack. "It sounds awfullike things in the papers they read in the kitchen. . . . They'll read about it in all the kitchens. They'll read the the evidence aloud."

Douglas looked up at her gravely. The whole conduct of this expedition to the uttermost ends of the earth lay upon his shoulders, and he had been thinking, not so much of the elopement itself, as of the tiresome details of hold and cabin luggage, large "inside" versus small "outside" tips, customs, stop-over indorsements. But he

met her mood at once. He had always understood and met her moods. The man she was leaving behind had never thought it worth while.

"Look here, dear," he said kindly, "we've thrashed out all that, and everything else. We've agreed we aren't going to be frightened by the mere names of things. Let's think of where we're going to-the wonderful South Seas that you've always longed to visit. Coral islands, Grace-palm-trees and blue seas and canoes, and parrots flying about, and all those jolly sorts of things. Somewhere right away at the end of everything, where there'll be nobody who ever knew us, and we can have a new life. You know."

"Yes, I know," said Grace, sitting down beside him, "but somehow, just now, when the train began to move, and I felt the thing was done, it seemed as if something with two hands took hold of my heart-just the plain heart that one feels beating—and twisted it like linen that you wring.

Do you think that all the people who have said that their 'hearts were wrung,' for hundreds and hundreds of years, felt just that same thing? Somehow, I never knew it was more than a way of speaking."

"I think they did," said Douglas. "Sorrow's an old thing, and the same thing all along. And you and I can't escape paying our shot, any more than all the rest since Adam."

"How much trouble there has been since the world began-and all the same!" sighed Grace.

She was not a young woman; Douglas and she were much of an age, and he was close on forty. But she was exceedingly pretty, with a wistful prettiness of deep, wondering, gray-green eyes and misty, redgold hair, and her youth had been reborn. since Douglas came to her.

Married young and "well," as the phrase goes, she had passed her time as most society women pass it, harmlessly and ineffectually, with little romance in her life, and small sorrow save the death of an only baby. Then, in her later thirties, this man of her own class, like the rest, and yet different with all the difference that lies between hard noon and golden dawn, had come to show her that he was her man and her mate, and that the commonplace gentleman whose rings she had worn so long was a stranger.

In those days Grace had been fond of looking up the old, massive, green-moroccobound volumes of songs belonging to a bygone generation, and singing softly to herself the naive melodies of the "Claribel" school. "Strangers Yet" was her favorite:

After years of life together,
After fair and stormy weather,
After travel in far lands,
After touch of wedded hands,
. . . Strangers yet!

They meant so much more than modern ones, those songs of long ago, she thought. They were all about her, or else about Douglas. Two of them-what a treasure-trove that was! even had his name. "Douglas, tender and true," was almost too painful. She liked better the song in which "She and Douglas Gordon were drowned in the sea." For at that time it had not even occurred to Grace as possible that she should run away from her husband. Being drowned with Douglas was the highest form of happiness that seemed to her conceivable for a good woman like herself.

It was a motor-car that made the trouble. Douglas was a splendid and daring motorist; Grace's husband never allowed one of his cars to be driven over fifteen miles an hour. He did not mind his wife's taking an occasional run with a man like Douglas Pierce, whom everybody knew all about; Grace was mad on speed, and if she would tear across country at seventy miles an hour, it was as well to have the best driver in England to take care of her. His wife's fancy in songs had conveyed nothing to him; her occasional fits of weeping certainly disturbed him, and caused him to insist upon doses of hypophosphite syrup after meals; but they led him no farther into the fields of speculation.

As for any trouble arising out of her fancy for high-speed racing-cars, he would as soon have expected distress and disgrace to spring from his own blameless interest in shorthorn cattle.

It may be that, like many stupid people, Grace's husband "builded better than he knew" in this matter. It may be that, but for a certain accident, Douglas would have carried out the intention he had often considered, of moving to another county and seeing nothing more of Grace; that Grace would have gone on singing her Victorian songs, and weeping now and then, and would at last have taken up her life on the old lines once more, walking perhaps in the shadow of the might-have-been, but with her eyes lifted toward the sun. However, Chance had it otherwise.

They were trying Douglas's new racer, a gray, torpedo-shaped thing that could beat the Flying Scotchman on any parallel road, and that had already cost its owner several heavy fines. They went no distance at all for the motor, only seventy miles or so, and they were just turning to get back in good time for dinner when, at the corner of a road, a tire came off. The motor turned half a somersault, and flung itself over a wall. It was hopelessly smashed; Grace escaped unhurt by something like a miracle; but Douglas was thrown on his head, and lay insensible in a lonely field, five miles from anywhere, with a distracted woman crying and calling over him for a good two hours.

He came round again, sick and shaken, and rode to the nearest village on the back of a plow horse that fortunately happened to be going home that way. There was an inn of sorts; they had some dinner and a

whisky-and-soda, since the wine was obviously dangerous to human life, and Douglas declared himself perfectly well again, and able to take the train. They went out to walk to the station, which was near at hand, trusting to Douglas's watch for the time. . . . It had been damaged by the fall; it stopped for ten minutes, and in that ten minutes the destiny of three lives was shaped. They had missed the last train.

A lady-Mrs. Jones; a nice, soft-spoken lady with pleasant ways, according to the landlady of the inn-stayed there alone for a day and a half; Mr. Jones, as nice a gentleman as you would wish to see, went away on business to London. When he came back he brought Mrs. Jones's trunks with him, and his own. These were all new; Mr. Jones explained that it was because they were going on a long voyage. They went away as soon as the luggage came, and Mrs. Jones seemed very sorry to leave the country, for she was crying a little as they left the hotel, under her veil, where she thought one would not see.

When the landlady saw the newspapers afterward, and the portraits, and read the carefully-veiled hints that accompanied these (for Grace's husband had not yet filed his petition), she declared that she should never, on any account, believe in the goodness of any one again, man or woman, and that she would not, now, trust her own husband alone with a Hottentot. Indeed, one of the by-products of the Pierce-Chambers elopement was an increased stringency of household legislation that made the life of a certain unnamed and unknown landlord burdensome for months to come. But of that small floating thread the Fates engaged in spinning the lives of Douglas and Grace recked nothing.

It was impossible to believe that all this had happened not three days before, and Grace said so. She was a woman of temperament rather than intellect, and at times had a talent for the obvious that would have bored Pierce in any other person. But Grace never bored him. While the train roared on its way to Tilbury, throwing behind it mile by mile the Via Dolorosa of so many English hearts, she told him everything that lay heavy on her mind, including many things that she had told him many times before, and he took

the troubles one by one, patiently, and laughed, reasoned, or consoled each one away. When the sack was shaken out at last, as they ran through the green, green meadows that meet the eyes of the English exile coming home, he told her to take off her left glove, and give her hand to him. She did so, wondering, and out of his pocket he drew a ring a heavy, plain gold band.

"Drop your ring out of the window," he said. She did it, leaning forward to meet the freshening gusts from the sea. The docks were coming near.

"There is something inside the ring," he said, and she looked, but could not read it. "What character is it?" she asked. "Old Egyptian," he answered. "It's something that I saw in a book of travel. They found it engraved on some Egyptian love-gift, I don't know how many thousand years old. Here's the translation; read it, and tear it up."

It had been neatly typed on a slip of paper, and it read:

"I found thee: I keep thee: may the gods give thee to me for ever."

"I never knew I was such a cry-baby," said Grace, wiping her eyes and dropping her veil, as they slacked down for Tilbury. The ring was on her hand.

"And now for the end of the world," she added, taking his arm to step out of the carriage. "I can see the palms and the coral islands already. Douglas, is that the steamer out there?"

"Yes," he answered, looking eagerly at the smoking funnel. Neither of the two had traveled beyond the usual round upon the Continent, and the adventure seemed tremendous. What of the old life, its sadnesses, its disgrace, could survive there at the other side of the globe, in the mysterious, savage South Sea Islands?

The voyage to Sydney was a fine one; the ship was big and new, and she had few passengers at that time of year, when every one was traveling the opposite way. No one on board recognized Grace or Douglas; nobody supposed they were anything but what they seemed a married couple who were rather fonder of each other than married couples verging on forty generally are. They were popular on the ship, although it was considered that they kept to themselves rather more than was necessary, seeing that they were, after all, "no one in particular."