ther, be taken for granted.
Bulstrode on this day, travelling as he was towards a goal, towards the
one person he wanted above all to see, had spent some unusual thought
on his toilet. At all events, on passing a florist's in Piccadilly,
after giving his order for flowers to be boxed and expressed to
Westboro', he had selected a tiny reddish-brown chrysanthemum which now
covered the button-hole of his coat's lapel; it created a distinctive
scheme of color. In point of fact it caught the eye of the lady who,
hurrying from the waiting-room towards the Westboro' express, caught
sight of the American and started. It appeared as if she would speak
to him, half advanced, thought better of it, and said to the guard, who
was about to fasten a placard on the window of a carriage:

"Please---just a second--won't you, guard?"

The bell rang, and Bulstrode found himself helping the lady into his
own compartment. The guard shut the door, which closed with the
customary soft thick sound of a lock setting, and pasted over the
window the exclusive and forbidding paper--RESERVED.

Then it was in his corner by the window, once chimney pots and suburbs
left behind, that the traveller to Westboro' watched the landscape with
the pale, transparent smoke from the little farms floating like veils
across the golden atmosphere; the slow winding streams between
low-bushed, rosy shores, and red-tinged thickets; the flocks of rooks
across fields long harvested: the flocks of sheep on the gently
swelling downs.

"England, England," he murmured, as if it were a refrain in whose
melody he found much charm, as if his traditions of insular forebears
might in some way be recalled in the word, as if it spoke more than a
chance traveller's appreciation for the melodious countryside.

He had letters, read them, and put his correspondence aside, then
comfortably settling himself in his corner, began to construct for
himself a picture of Westboro', whose lines and architecture he knew
from photographs, although he had never been there. It was agreeable
to him as he mused to fancy himself for the first time with Mrs.
Falconer in England, in the country they preferred to all the others in
the Old World. They were in sympathy with English life and manners,
and here, if (oh, of course, a world of "ifs")--here no doubt they
would both choose to live when abroad, were there any choice for them
of mutual life.

Westboro' is Elizabethan and of vast propo