I didn't argue the point. But I guessed then (and I still think my guess was right) that that had been her way of refusing him. And perhaps, after all, it was the best way--the best because it could not but leave him with a tinge of disappointment in her. After such words, it would be hard for him to feel pity for her loneliness. Sometimes now I wonder what would have happened if I had said to him outright: "Mizzi loves you, despite her refusal, and her misery now that you've gone is more your fault than any of these other things, and also far easier to undo. Go back and love her and be happy...." He mightn't have believed me, and he certainly wouldn't have obeyed me; but perhaps, in his moments of deepest remorse, he would have tacked on Mizzi's unhappiness to the already heavy enough load of his own responsibilities. And that, of course, was the chief reason why I didn't tell him. VII The long journey passed, and by the time we reached the Swiss frontier, we knew all that the newspapers knew, at any rate, concerning the tragedy. It was an ordinary enough story of a driver trying to make up lost time and negotiating a curve ten miles an hour too fast. Result: derailment and a death-roll, so far, of twenty-four. The Basle newspapers, though they took great care to be incorrect about Severn's life and career (one of them even called him "l'avocat général de l'Angleterre"), gave no information as to the nature or extent of his injury. Somehow the absence of detail, and the fact that we were already nearer Paris than Vienna, overwhelmed me with a sense of this sharper and more instant tragedy; perhaps for the first time I ceased to think about Mizzi. I told Terry, as we stood at the buffet-counter at Troyes, that I was glad we had come, because if we could help Severn even a little, it would be worth while. He gripped my arm eagerly and replied: "I _knew_ you would think that--I knew you would." Early in the morning we passed very slowly the scene of the accident (only a few miles from the Gare de l'Est), and saw the gigantic litter of wreckage, and the break-down cranes still working over the shattered and telescoped coaches. A dull drizzling rain was falling, and a grinning baby advertising a famous soap looked down on the scene from the wall of a near-by factory. Ten minutes later we were pacing the long platform of the terminus. The entire station and precincts were packed with English conducted tourists to the popular Swiss resorts; uniformed guides were shepherding them into groups, and I heard one of them promise his party that very soon they would be able to see "the place where the train ran off the lines." A gratuitous tit-bit added by Providence to their Ten Days in Lovely Lucerne.