It was not till the little party had started and aroused the suspicion of a few idlers, though another quarter of an hour would pass before the vague alarm took shape, spread abroad and thrilled the town, that Oliver recollected the 11.30 train north was the very train by which the newly-married pair were to travel. He told himself the next moment that amongst the hundreds in the train there was little likelihood that the Birts should be the particular victims. The place where the last portion of the train had run off the line, with the usual amount of overthrow and wreck, lay about midway between Friarton and the next station, from which assistance had already come, before the Friarton station-master and his band of helpers arrived. Oliver saw only the _débris_ of broken carriages and a throng of excited but uninjured people, when he leapt from the engine, on reaching his destination. ‘Not so bad as had been feared from the earliest report,’ Oliver heard proclaimed by various voices immediately. Two of the smashed carriages were found to have been empty. Only one carriage and the guard’s van were occupied. A woman had been killed, and five or six persons more or less hurt.’ Oliver Constable passed through the eager speakers, looking on every side for the Birts, half expecting to find ’Mily in hysterics if she had happened to be in a carriage near those which had broken loose, and if she had seen anything of the accident. Before he was aware he found himself close to the waiting-room into which the sufferers had been carried. A railway servant at the door, taking it for granted that Oliver was seeking for the room and had a right to enter, beckoned him in before he could think where he was going, among the doctors and their patients—fainting or groaning, while pulses were felt, heads bandaged, and limbs set. Oliver prepared to retreat, but first he cast a quick glance round. Stay! Was not that Birt in the soiled, jaunty new clothes for which ’Mily had paid, out of her little bit of money? The man did not look much the worse, in spite of the outcry he was making over what a doctor was coolly pooh-poohing as a trifle of a broken collar-bone. But where was ’Mily? In another moment Oliver learnt the incredible fact that Birt did not know. The bridegroom had been smoking with the guard in the van when the accident happened, and ever since then—speaking from Birt’s point of view—he had been in far too bad a way to enquire after anybody. But no doubt she was somewhere outside, gaping and screeching with the rest of the women. She ought to be looked up at once—Birt grumbled crossly, taking the first word of scolding—to see if she could not make a beginning in minding her duty, and trying to do something for him when he was in mortal agony and as sick as a dog.