There glanced across her mind for a moment a sort of desperate gleam of reflection from her father’s words: “You like to be independent; the best thing you can do is to marry.” There was a kind of truth in it, a sort of distorted truth, such as was likely enough to come through the medium of a mind so wholly at variance with all established forms. Independent--there was something in that; and India was full of novelty, amusing, a sort of world she had no experience of. A tremor of excitement got into her nerves as she heard the bell ring, and knew that he had come for her. He! the only individual who was at all interesting for the moment, whom she held in her hands, to do what she pleased with. She could turn him round her little finger, as her father said: and independence! Was it a Mephistopheles that was tempting her, or a good angel leading her the right way? CHAPTER XXI. Frances remembered little of the journey after it was over, though she was keenly conscious of everything at the time, if there can be any keen consciousness of a thing which is all vague, which conveys no clear idea. Through the darkness of the night, which came on before she had left the coast she knew, with all those familiar towns gleaming out as she passed--Mentone, Monaco on its headland, the sheltering bays which keep so warm and bright those cities of sickness, of idleness, and pleasure--the palms, the olives, the oranges, the aloe hedges, the roses and heliotropes--there was a confused and breathless sweep of distance, half in the dark, half in the light, the monotonous plains, the lines of poplars, the straight highroads of France. Paris, where they stayed for a night, was only like a bigger, noisier, vast railway station, to Frances. She had no time, in the hurry of her journey, in the still greater hurry of her thoughts, to realise that here was the scene of that dread Revolution of which she had read with shuddering excitement--that she was driven past the spot where the guillotine was first set up, and through the streets where the tumbrels had rolled, carrying to that dread death the many tender victims, who were all she knew of that great convulsion of history. Markham, who was so good to her, put his head out of the carriage and pointed to a series of great windows flashing with light. “What a pity there’s no time!” he said. She asked “For what?” with the most complete want of comprehension. “For shopping, of course,” he said, with a laugh. For shopping! She seemed to be unacquainted with the meaning of the words. In the midst of this strange wave of the unknown which was carrying her away, carrying her to a world more unknown still, to suppose that she could pause and think of shopping! The inappropriateness of the suggestion bewildered Frances. Markham, indeed, altogether bewildered her. He was very good to her, attending to her comfort, watchful over her needs in a way which she could not have imagined possible.