“I tremble to think,” replied the invalid. “I have advertised for your suffragette in the Union Paper. Courtesy said what a mercy it would be if she should have got safely away and wouldn’t come back, so I advertised, just to show that I disagreed. I never knew her name, so I described her appearance....” “Her little size ...” he said eagerly. “Her small and hollow eyes. Her darling-coloured hair that always blew forward along her cheeks....” “Well, I didn’t put it like that,” said Mrs. Rust. “She had such wonderful little hands,” said the gardener, upon whom a sick-bed had a softening, not to say maudlin effect. “You could see everything she thought in her hands. They were not very white, but pale brown. You might have mentioned them. But she is obviously mine. Nobody could overlook that. Nobody could overlook her at all.” “On the contrary,” said Mrs. Rust, “she is a perfectly insignificant-looking young woman. And I am sure that she would strongly resent your describing her as though she were a dog with your name on its collar. She had sensible views about women.” You have been intended to suppose all this time that the suffragette had succumbed to the earthquake, but as she is the heroine—though an unworthy one—of this book, I am sure you have not been deceived. Loth as I am to admit that a friend of mine should have been so near to such an experience without reaping the benefit of it, I am obliged by tiresome truth to confess that she was never aware of the earthquake as an earthquake at all. She was in the train when it happened, a little Christian the Pilgrim, making her way through many difficulties up to the Delectable Mountains. Far off they stood, defying the pale sea and the pale plains, shadowed mountains, each with its cool brow crowned by a halo of cloud. The train service in Trinity Islands is not their chief attraction. First, second, and third class alike may watch the vivid country from the windows, otherwise there is no compensation for rich or poor. The price of a first-class fare is supposed to guarantee your fellow-passengers matching yourself as nearly as possible in complexion; it also entitles you to a deformed wicker chair in a compartment that a cow would appeal against in the Home Country. The wicker chair, unsettled by its migratory life, amuses itself by travelling drunkenly around the truck, unless you lash yourself to the door-handle with your pocket-handkerchief, or evolve some other ingenious device.