to tell. She
was wearing her brown jacket and fur cap because Tommy had liked them,
and she sat straight and stiff all the way. She had never been in a
train since she was a baby, except two or three times to Tilliedrum,
and she thought this was the right way to sit. Always, when the train
stopped, which was at long intervals, she put her head out at the
window and asked if this was the train to London. Every station a
train stops at in the middle of the night is the infernal regions, and
she shuddered to hear lost souls clanking their chains, which is what
a milk-can becomes on its way to the van; but still she asked if this
was the train to London. When fellow-passengers addressed her, she was
very modest and cautious in her replies. Sometimes a look of
extraordinary happiness, of radiance, passed over her face, and may
have puzzled them. It was part of the thought that, however ill he
might be, she was to see him now.

She did not see him as soon as she expected, for at the door of
Tommy's lodgings they told her that he had departed suddenly for the
Continent about a week ago. He was to send an address by and by to
which letters could be forwarded. Was he quite well when he went away?
Grizel asked, shaking.

The landlady and her daughter thought he was rather peakish, but he
had not complained.

He went away for his health, Grizel informed them, and he was very ill
now. Oh, could they not tell her where he was? All she knew was that
he was very ill. "I am engaged to be married to him," she said with
dignity. Without this strange certainty that Tommy loved her at last,
she could not have trod the road which faced her now. Even when she
had left the house, where at their suggestion she was to call
to-morrow, she found herself wondering at once what he would like her
to do now, and she went straight to a hotel, and had her box sent to
it from the station, and she remained there all day because she
thought that this was what he would like her to do. She sat bolt
upright on a cane chair in her bedroom, praying to God with her eyes
open; she was begging Him to let Tommy tell her where he was, and
promising to return home at once if he did not need her.

Next morning they showed her, at his lodgings, two lines in a
newspaper, which said that he was ill with bronchitis at the Hotel
Krone, Bad-Platten, in Switzerland.

It may have been an answer to her prayer, as she thought, but we know
now how the paragraph got into