e seat she said, "I can't get enough of
it."

"But isn't this old rattletrap rather too rough for you?" he asked.

"Oh no," she said, visiting him with a furtive turn of her eyes. "It's
quite ideally what invalids in easy circumstances are advised to take
carriage exercise."

"Yes, it's certainly carriage exercise," Verrian admitted in the same
spirit, if it was a drolling spirit. He could not help being amused
by the situation in which they had been brought together, through the
vigorous promptitude of Miss Macroyd in making the victoria her own, and
the easy indifference of Mrs. Westangle as to how they should get to
her house. If he had been alone he might have felt the indifference as
a slight, but as it was he felt it rather a favor. If Miss Shirley was
feeling it a slight, she was too secret or too sweet to let it be
known, and he thought that was nice of her. Still, he believed he might
recognize the fact without deepening a possible hurt of hers, and he
added, with no apparent relevance, "If Mrs. Westangle was not looking
for us on this train, she will find that it is the unexpected which
happens."

"We are certainly going to happen," the girl said, with an acceptance of
the plural which deepened the intimacy of the situation, and which was
not displeasing to Verrian when she added, "If our friend's vehicle
holds out." Then she turned her face full upon him, with what affected
him as austere resolution, in continuing, "But I can't let you suppose
that you're conveying a society person, or something of that sort, to
Mrs. Westangle's." His own face expressed his mystification, and she
concluded, "I'm simply going there to begin my work."

He smiled provisionally in temporizing with the riddle. "You women are
wonderful, nowadays, for the work you do."

"Oh, but," she protested, nervously, anxiously, "it isn't good work that
I'm going to do--I understand what you mean--it's work for a living.
I've no business to be arriving with an invited guest, but it seemed to
be a question of arriving or not at the time when I was due."

IX.

Verrian stared at her now from a visage that was an entire blank, though
behind it conjecture was busy, and he was asking himself whether his
companion was some new kind of hair-dresser, or uncommonly cultivated
manicure, or a nursery governess obeying a hurry call to take a place in
Mrs. Westangle's household, or some sort of amateur housekeeper arriving
to supplant a profe