on the engine-driver and stoker were
busy with coal and grease. 'Five minutes hence, and our lives, and our
correctness, and our luxury, will be in their grimy hands,' I said to
myself. Strange world, the world of the _train de grand luxe_! But a
world of brothers! I regained my carriage, exactly, after all, as the
inhabitants of Torquay regained theirs.

Then the wondrous self-contained microcosm, shimmering with gilt and
varnish and crystal, glorious in plush and silk, heavy with souls and all
that correct souls could possibly need in twenty hours, gathered itself
up and rolled forward, swiftly, and more swiftly, into the wide, gray
landscapes of France. The vibrating and nerve-destroying monotony of a
long journey had commenced. We were summoned by white gloves to luncheon;
and we lunched in a gliding palace where the heavenly dreams of a railway
director had received their most luscious expression--and had then been
modestly hidden by advertisements of hotels and brandy. The Southern
flowers shook in their slender glasses, and white gloves balanced dishes
as if on board ship, and the electric fans revolved ceaselessly. As I was
finishing my meal, a middle-aged woman whom I knew came down the car
towards me. She had evidently not recognised me.

'How do you do, Miss Kate?' I accosted her.

It was the younger of Vicary's two maiden sisters. I guessed that the
other could not be far away.

She hesitated, stopped, and looked down at me, rather as the negro had
done.

'Oh! how do you do, Miss Peel?' she said distantly, with a nervous
simper; and she passed on.

This was my first communication, since my disappearance, with the world
of my London friends and acquaintances. I perceived, of course, from
Miss Kate's attitude that something must have occurred, or something must
have been assumed, to my prejudice. Perhaps Frank had also vanished for a
time, and the rumour ran that we were away together. I smiled frigidly.
What matter? In case Miss Vicary should soon be following her sister, I
left without delay and went back to my coupe; it would have been a pity
to derange these dames. Me away with Frank! What folly to suppose it! Yet
it might have been. I was in heart what these dames probably took me for.
I read a little in the _Imitation of Christ_ which Aunt Constance had
meant to give me, that book which will survive sciences and even
Christianity itself. 'Think not that thou hast made any progress,' I
read, 'unle