seemed wonderful to him that any
one should perform with such careless ease the difficult task of making
tea in public in a lurching train. He would never have dared to order it
for himself, lest he should attract the notice of his fellow-passengers;
but, secure in the shelter of her conspicuousness, he sipped the inky
draught with a delicious sense of exhilaration.

Lily, with the flavour of Selden's caravan tea on her lips, had no great
fancy to drown it in the railway brew which seemed such nectar to her
companion; but, rightly judging that one of the charms of tea is the fact
of drinking it together, she proceeded to give the last touch to Mr.
Gryce's enjoyment by smiling at him across her lifted cup.

"Is it quite right--I haven't made it too strong?" she asked
solicitously; and he replied with conviction that he had never tasted
better tea.

"I daresay it is true," she reflected; and her imagination was fired by
the thought that Mr. Gryce, who might have sounded the depths of the most
complex self-indulgence, was perhaps actually taking his first journey
alone with a pretty woman.

It struck her as providential that she should be the instrument of his
initiation. Some girls would not have known how to manage him. They would
have over-emphasized the novelty of the adventure, trying to make him
feel in it the zest of an escapade. But Lily's methods were more
delicate. She remembered that her cousin Jack Stepney had once defined
Mr. Gryce as the young man who had promised his mother never to go out in
the rain without his overshoes; and acting on this hint, she resolved to
impart a gently domestic air to the scene, in the hope that her
companion, instead of feeling that he was doing something reckless or
unusual, would merely be led to dwell on the advantage of always having a
companion to make one's tea in the train.

But in spite of her efforts, conversation flagged after the tray had been
removed, and she was driven to take a fresh measurement of Mr. Gryce's
limitations. It was not, after all, opportunity but imagination that he
lacked: he had a mental palate which would never learn to distinguish
between railway tea and nectar. There was, however, one topic she could
rely on: one spring that she had only to touch to set his simple
machinery in motion. She had refrained from touching it because it was a
last resource, and she had relied on other arts to stimulate other
sensations; but as a settled look of