“Only just death,” she thought, fingering the little bottle of laudanum she had been forced to sign her name to get, “or Mother Felicitas--for she’ll trace me by it. Well, I’d rather die out here than live in the convent.” She had walked on aimlessly enough, and looked up to see that she was in front of the entrance to a railway-station, where people kept going in and out. With a sudden inspiration she followed a woman inside, and stood behind her at the booking-office. A train was waiting, ready to leave; on the carriage nearest her was a sign, “For Blackpool.” She knew where that was, even with her badly learned geography lessons; it was a long way off from London and Mother Felicitas. She bought a second-class ticket, imitating the woman in front of her. At least she could rest in the train, since her tired feet would hardly carry her. She had no money at all when she had paid for her ticket, and could just manage to follow a porter and stumble into the carriage marked Blackpool. To her joy no one else entered it, and the train started. The cushioned carriage was rapture to her tired body, but before she stretched herself out on its scant luxury, she drained the little bottle the chemist had sold her, and threw it away. Then she curled herself up and slept; at first uneasily, with the unaccustomed sounds of the moving train in her dreams, and then heavily, as people sleep themselves to death. There was no peace in the world for such as she, and at sixteen Beryl Corselas had found it out. She had tried to get employment, but the women at whose doors she had knocked wanted no such unearthly-looking nursemaids, and she could do nothing else. To sleep her life away was all she could do, and there would be plenty of time for that between London and Blackpool. Remorselessly as the wheels of fate the train rolled on, and dreamlessly the girl slept. If she had known two things she might have flung the laudanum from her like a snake. The first was that Andria Heathcote had been longing for her, yet not daring to visit her in the safe refuge of the convent. The second, that if Mother Felicitas had known that her missing pupil had gone to Blackpool she would have laughed silently, since that was the only part of England Beryl Corselas had to avoid. But in ignorance and despair the girl had drugged herself till a creepy warmth was in her veins, and so, bound and helpless, would deliver herself to a worse than Mother Felicitas, unless Death, like a quiet friend, called her before such things could be. CHAPTER IV. THE LOVELY ANDRIA. While Beryl Corselas slept like a dead girl in the flying railway-carriage, a woman sat in a beautiful house in London and wondered why she was remembering the strange goblin child. “I’m not fit to think of her or the convent, either,” she thought grimly. “Who would believe that I was ever Andria Heathcote, or brought up in a convent school?”