"Then are you sure that it is your star?"

"No one can ever mistake that," he declared. "Sometimes one may lose
one's way, and one may even falter if the path is rugged. But the star
remains."

She sighed. Her eyes seemed to have wandered away. He felt that it was
a trick to avoid looking at him for the moment.

"I do not want you to go to Manchester on Monday in your present mood,"
she said. "I hate to think of you up there, the stormy petrel, the
apostle of unrest and sedition. If I were a Roman woman, I think that I
would poison you to-night at dinner-time."

"Quite an idea," he remarked. "I am not at all sure that our having
become too civilised for crime is a healthy sign of the times."

"I do wish," she persisted, "that you would try and see things a little
more humanly. My uncle is full of enthusiasms about you. You have had
some conversation already, haven't you?"

"We talked for an hour after luncheon," Maraton admitted. "Your uncle's
is a very sane point of view. I know just how he regards me--a sort of
dangerous enthusiast, a firebrand with the knack of commanding
attention. The worst of it is that when I am with him, he almost makes
me feel like that myself."

She laughed.