It was a very close shave; but Ralph Wilton was just in time. The bell had rung before he had taken his ticket, after seeing a favorite pointer properly disposed of. "Here you are, sir," cried a porter, opening the door of a carriage. Wilton jumped in, and the door was slammed. "Stop! I say, porter," he shouted, as he glanced at the only other occupant, thinking to himself, "An unprotected female! this is too formidable!" But his voice was drowned in the loud panting of the engine, and they were off. "It cannot be helped," he thought, and set about arranging himself as comfortably as he could. His companion was a young lady, he perceived, as his eyes became accustomed to the lamp-light. She was in black, and rather thinly clad for a night-journey. Her bonnet lay in the netting overhead. And a blue scarf was loosely tied over her head and ears. She seemed already asleep, though Wilton was dimly aware that she had opened a pair of large dark eyes to look at him. She was a serious drawback to the comfort of his journey. But for her he could make a bed of the cushions, and stretch himself at full length; but for her he could solace himself with unlimited cigars, and enjoy the freedom of loneliness. Thinking thus, he stooped forward to take up an evening paper he had snatched at the last moment, and his cigar-case fell from his pocket. His obnoxious fellow-traveller opened her eyes. "If you smoke," she said, "do not mind me; it may help me to sleep." With a slight shiver she closed her eyes again, apparently without hearing Wilton's thanks, while his unspoken maledictions on the ill chance that placed her in the same carriage were, in some mysterious way, silenced and arrested by the charm of a soft, sweet voice, delicate yet full, with a certain sadness in its tones, and an accent not quite English. "A gentlewoman, I imagine," thought Wilton, as he moved from his place to the centre seat opposite her to be nearer the light. There was something touching in the childlike abandonment of her attitude; her head lay back in the angle of the division she occupied; her face was very pale, and a dark shade under the eyes bespoke fatigue. Long black lashes fringed her closed eyes, curling back at the ends, and all of color was concentrated in her delicately-curved lips. Ralph Wilton could not help glancing from his paper to her face, and forming conjectures respecting her. Why did her people let so fair, so young a creature wander about by herself? But he was by no means old enough to adopt a fatherly view of so pretty a subject. She must be seventeen or eighteen--here his companion murmured in her sleep, and sighed deeply; while Wilton, with a sudden access of chivalrous modesty, reproaching himself for presuming upon her unconsciousness to scan so closely the tender, childlike face that lay hushed before him, withdrew to his original position. Here he tried to read, but the face and figure of the old recluse nobleman flitted