She lay on the floor, lax, inert as the dead; but her eyes were open. Where was she? What was this hard, narrow place, where a light burned dimly? She thought for one awful instant of her alcove at the convent, and screamed wildly; but the train was starting and the whistles of the engine covered it. The noise of the wheels reassured the drugged wits of the girl on the floor. “No; it’s not the convent--it’s the train, and I’ve waked up! Oh, why didn’t I die? Am I going to live after all that stuff?” She struggled up and back to her seat, dizzy and sick from the laudanum. She tried to think. What should she--what could she--do now? Life was before her, and not the death she had craved. Presently the train would stop; they would put her out into the cold and darkness, and she had no money for shelter or bread. “They ought to kill girls like me!” she sobbed. “What good has life ever been to me! And what shall I do if I’ve been tracked--if a telegram from Mother Felicitas is before me at Blackpool?” Every one’s hand had been against her all her life, and it was well for her now. For a madness of determination came over her. “They sha’n’t find me! No one shall find me,” she thought, clenching her hands. “I’ll hide somewhere and starve sooner than go back to Mother Felicitas!” She opened the carriage window and drank in the cold evening air. It drove the fumes of laudanum from her and stopped the headache that was rending her. She had no reason to go to Blackpool; she could starve as easily in some other place. What if she got out the first time the train stopped, and slipped away into the dark? But it had been the stoppage of the train at Preston that had wakened her; she did not know there would be no pause between that and Blackpool. The train seemed to whirl interminably on, and she shut the window and lay back against the cushions; she would have warmth and rest as long as she could. Strangely enough, she felt better for that drugged sleep--more reasonable, more sane. But, think as she might, she could see nothing but a miserable, lingering death before her, and the death that had passed her by would have been easy. The train whistled, then stopped; the guard came and took her ticket. “Blackpool, miss,” he said to the pale girl with the swollen, weary eyes. The convent uniform was black and he thought cursorily that she was in mourning, a thought that served her well afterward. She hurried by him without answering, and stood for one moment in the glaring station, bewildered by the crowd. Her white face, her tawny eyes, with that strange vacancy about them which long years of bullying had brought there, were striking enough among the commonplace crowd that surged by her. A long-legged, gentlemanly-looking man, whose handsome face was haggard and drawn till it almost came to being care-worn, pulled his brown mustache as he stood waiting for the London train.