When Gertrude found herself beside Trefusis in the Pullman, she wondered how she came to be travelling with him against her resolution, if not against her will. In the presence of two women scrutinizing her as if they suspected her of being there with no good purpose, a male passenger admiring her a little further off, her maid reading Trefusis’s newspapers just out of earshot, an uninterested country gentleman looking glumly out of window, a city man preoccupied with the “Economist,” and a polite lady who refrained from staring but not from observing, she felt that she must not make a scene; yet she knew he had not come there to hold an ordinary conversation. Her doubt did not last long. He began promptly, and went to the point at once. “What do you think of this engagement of mine?” This was more than she could bear calmly. “What is it to me?” she said indignantly. “I have nothing to do with it.” “Nothing! You are a cold friend to me then. I thought you one of the surest I possessed.” She moved as if about to look at him, but checked herself, closed her lips, and fixed her eyes on the vacant seat before her. The reproach he deserved was beyond her power of expression. “I cling to that conviction still, in spite of Miss Lindsay’s indifference to my affairs. But I confess I hardly know how to bring you into sympathy with me in this matter. In the first place, you have never been married, I have. In the next, you are much younger than I, in more respects than that of years. Very likely half your ideas on the subject are derived from fictions in which happy results are tacked on to conditions very ill-calculated to produce them--which in real life hardly ever do produce them. If our friendship were a chapter in a novel, what would be the upshot of it? Why, I should marry you, or you break your heart at my treachery.” Gertrude moved her eyes as if she had some intention of taking to flight.