rivals,
hoping that they would pass by her compartment. By some miraculous chance
she was left undisturbed until almost starting time, then a group of fat
women dashed along the platform with the celerity of fear, and crowded
ponderously in. The next moment the train began to slip away from the
station, and was soon rushing into the open country at high speed.

Of the details of that journey she knew nothing at all. She sat staring
out of the window, her thoughts racing faster than the train. The events
of the last few days receded from her mental vision like the flying houses
and fields outside the carriage window, fading into some remote distance
of her mind. Relief swelled in her heart as the train rushed west and
London was left farther and farther behind. Something within her seemed to
sing piercingly for joy, as though she had been a strange wild bird
escaping from captivity to wing her way westward to the open spaces by the
sea. London had frightened her. Its crowded vastness had suffocated her,
its indifference had appalled her. She had felt so hopelessly alone there;
far lonelier than she had ever been in Cornwall or Norfolk. Nature could
be brutal, but never indifferent. She could be friendly--sometimes. The
sea and the sky had whispered loving greetings to her, but not London.
There was nothing but a hideous and blank indifference there. She was glad
to get away--away from the endless rows of shops and houses, from the
unceasing throngs of indifferent people, back to the lonely moors of
Cornwall, to look down from the rocks at the sea, and breathe the keen
gusty air.

As the journey advanced and the train swept farther west she became dull,
languid, almost inert. Lack of food and the previous night's exposure
induced in her a feeling of giddiness which at times had in it something
of the nature of delirium. In this state her mind turned persistently to
Thalassa, and the object of her return to him. She was struggling towards
him, up great heights, under a nightmare burden. She seemed to see him
standing there with his hands outstretched, ready to lift the burden off
her shoulders if she could only reach him. Then she was back in the
kitchen at Flint House, watching him bending over his lamps, listening to
the wicked old song he used to sing--

"The devil and me we went away to sea,
In the old brig 'Lizbeth-Jane...."

The train caught up the refrain and thundered it into her tired head ...
"Went