should offer to carry your bag; but will you allow me to reserve
a joint table for _dejeuner_? There will be a rush for the first
service, which is the best, as a rule, and I have friends at court on
this line. Please don't say you are not hungry."

"That would be impolite, and horribly untrue," laughed Helen.

He took the implied permission, and hurried away. They did not meet
again until he came to her carriage in the train.

"Is this where you are?" he cried, looking up at her through the open
window. "I am in the next block, as they say in America. When you are
ready I shall take you to the dining car. Come out on the platform.
The corridors are simply impassable. And here are baskets of peaches,
and ripe pears, and all manner of pleasant fruits. Yes, try the
corridor to the right, and charge resolutely. If you inflict the
maximum injury on others, you seldom damage yourself."

In a word, Mark Bower spoke as lightheartedly as he professed to feel,
and Helen had no cause whatever to be other than thankful for the
chance that brought him to Switzerland on the same day and in the same
train as herself. His delicate consideration for her well being was
manifested in many ways. That such a man, whom she knew to be a figure
of importance in the financial world, should take an interest in the
simple chronicles of her past life was a flattering thing in itself.
He listened sympathetically to the story of her struggles since the
death of her mother. The consequent stoppage of the annuity paid to
the widow of an Indian civilian rendered it necessary that Helen
should supplement by her own efforts the fifty pounds a year allotted
to her "until death or marriage."

"There are plenty of country districts where I could exist quite
easily on such a sum," she said; "but I declined to be buried alive in
that fashion, and I made up my mind to earn my own living. Somehow,
London appeals to young people situated as I was. It is there that the
great prizes are to be gained; so I came to London."

"From----" broke in Bower, who was peeling one of the peaches bought
at Calais.

"From a village near Sheringham, in Norfolk."

He nodded with smiling comprehension when she detailed her struggles
with editors who could detect no originality in her literary work.

"But that phase has passed now," he said encouragingly.

"Well, it looks like it. I hope so; for I am tired of classifying
beetles."

There--the word was out at last. Pe