delay at Salisbury, and he ate some food and drank some
brandy.

Then at last he found himself in the London train, in an empty
compartment of a corridor coach. He sat with folded arms, his hat
pulled low on his forehead, his eyes peering suspiciously out of the
window, or at the door of the corridor. Whenever anybody went by in
the corridor, he stooped his head lower and pretended to be asleep.

There were strange people in this train--soldiers and sailors from
Devonport; some foreigners too, or people dressed up to look like
foreigners; numbers of men also who kept their heads down as he was
doing, as if for some jolly good private reason. Who the hell were
they really? Detectives?

The train was going so fast now that it rocked to and fro, and hummed
and sang; but it seemed to Dale to be standing still--to be going
backward. This illusion was so strong for some moments that he jumped
up and went out into the corridor, to look down at the permanent way
on that side also. The lamplight from the train showed on both sides
that the sleepers, the chairs, the gravel, slipped and slid in the
correct direction. The train was flying, simply flying along the inner
up-track of the four sets of metals.

"I mustn't be so fullish," he kept saying to himself. "I'm all safe
now."

A sudden noise of voices drew him to the corridor; and he stood
holding a hand-rail, watching the leather walls and the gangway that
led into the next coach leap and dance and bob and sink, while he
listened eagerly. The roar of the train was so great here that he
could not catch what the hidden men were saying, but he understood
that they were sailors making too much noise and a railway guard
rebuking them. "It's nothing to do with me," he said to himself. "Why
_am_ I so fullish?"

He returned to the compartment, sat with his shoulder to the corridor,
and brooded dully and heavily. All that fiery trouble about Mavis and
her being dishonored had gone out of his mind as if forever; the
grievance and the rage and the hatred had gone too; temporarily there
was nothing but a most ponderous self-pity.

"What a mess this is," he thought. "What a hash I've made of it. What
a cruel thing to happen to me. What an awful hole I've put myself
into."

The train swept onward, and he began to doze. Then after a while he
slept and dreamed. He dreamed that he was here in this train, not
fettered, but spell-bound, unable to move and hide, only able to
understan