on them. McCurdie broke it with another laugh
and took a whiskey flask from his hand-bag.

"Have a nip?"

"Thanks, no," said the Professor. "I have to keep to a strict dietary,
and I only drink hot milk and water--and of that sparingly. I have some
in a thermos bottle."

Lord Doyne also declining the whiskey, McCurdie swallowed a dram and
declared himself to be better. The Professor took from his bag a foreign
review in which a German sciolist had dared to question his
interpretation of a Hittite inscription. Over the man's ineptitude he
fell asleep and snored loudly.

To escape from his immediate neighbourhood McCurdie went to the other
end of the seat and faced Lord Doyne, who had resumed his gold glasses
and his listless contemplation of obscure actresses. McCurdie lit a
pipe, Doyne another black cigar. The train thundered on.

Presently they all lunched together in the restaurant car. The windows
steamed, but here and there through a wiped patch of pane a white world
was revealed. The snow was falling. As they passed through Westbury,
McCurdie looked mechanically for the famous white horse carved into the
chalk of the down; but it was not visible beneath the thick covering of
snow.

"It'll be just like this all the way to Gehenna--Trehenna, I mean," said
McCurdie.

Doyne nodded. He had done his life's work amid all extreme fiercenesses
of heat and cold, in burning droughts, in simoons and in icy
wildernesses, and a ray or two more of the pale sun or a flake or two
more of the gentle snow of England mattered to him but little. But
Biggleswade rubbed the pane with his table-napkin and gazed
apprehensively at the prospect.

"If only this wretched train would stop," said he, "I would go back
again."

And he thought how comfortable it would be to sneak home again to his
books and thus elude not only the Deverills, but the Christmas jollities
of his sisters' families, who would think him miles away. But the train
was timed not to stop till Plymouth, two hundred and thirty-five miles
from London, and thither was he being relentlessly carried. Then he
quarrelled with his food, which brought a certain consolation.

* * * * *

The train did stop, however, before Plymouth--indeed, before Exeter. An
accident on the line had dislocated the traffic. The express was held up
for an hour, and when it was permitted to proceed, instead of thundering
on, it went cautiously, subject to conti