"Oh, I hope you won't think that of me! I assure you, Mr. Townsend, that if I had wished to dismiss you I should have done so. I hope you won't mind my saying--since you have yourself said so much--that as I left you my feeling was that, for once in a way, I had made a chance acquaintance which it might be worth one's while to cultivate. And, as I told you, I was practically alone in this big town, and when one is alone one does want friends, and--I think that that's all." That might be all, but I understood. When I left I felt that I liked Mrs. Carruth even better than I had done at first. She interested me in a really curious way. CHAPTER XIV. SELLING BOOMJOPFS. The newspapers on the Wednesday and Thursday were beyond my understanding. I had never before so clearly realised how great a stir a little thing might make. The little incident at Three Bridges had assumed the dimensions of an event of national importance. Had one of the great decisive battles of the world just been fought it could scarcely have seemed to occupy a greater space in the public mind. Everywhere the words stared you in the face, everywhere you heard the words slipping from somebody's tongue--Three Bridges Tragedy! At least the thing received a magnificent advertisement. What a heap of money would have been required to procure a similar advertisement for Pickemup's Pills. They appeared to have got the business into an elegant muddle. Either the luck was on my side, or some one had blundered. People seemed to have leaped to the conclusion that Louise had been thrown from a passing train--my pitching the body over the hedge on to the railway embankment, read by the light of after events, amounted to a stroke of inspiration. The papers were full of observations on the dangers of English railway travelling. Why were not our carriages all thrown open to the world? Our present system of horse-boxes rendered it possible for the innocent A. to be cooped up with the dangerous B. through sixty miles of country. The means provided for inter-communication, the alarm-bell, and all the rest of it, were fatally insufficient, as witness this most horrid instance. As I read I stared.