After this I supposed I must have napped for a time, for when next I looked out of the carriage window I found that the train was slowing its speed preparatory to entering Southampton. Luckily, the carriage I was in contained no other passengers, and I was able to pull myself together and munch a few biscuits before I had to hasten across the road outside the station and to march through the big dock gates, guarded by a burly constable, to that corner where incoming royal mail steamers are always berthed. As it happened, the _Atrato_ had not yet put in an appearance, and there were the usual crowds of anxious relatives, husbands, sweethearts, and loafers on the dock side, some brimming over with enjoyment at the prospect of near meetings with their loved ones, others looking nervous and fretful, as though they were the bearers of bad tidings to the returned exiles, or at all events feared the news which the incoming friends were carrying. One woman in particular attracted my attention--a tall, commanding figure in black, in widow's weeds, but with two of the most evil-looking eyes I had ever seen. Somehow this creature fascinated me. Her walk; her hands, which, luckily, were destitute of gloves; her expression on her thin, tightly-pressed lips; the cut of her chin when she raised her veil to get a better view of the approaching vessel, all told their striking yet deeply suggestive tale of character revealed by externals. And the tale was in every respect the same: the woman was bad, through and through. "Who on earth can she have come to meet?" I asked myself, with the curiosity that besets most observant folk in crowds when an awkward pause has come and there is nothing to do but to wait with what patience one can find, eager to pick up any casual amusement. "Not a husband, certainly, nor a lover, for in that case she would never parade those sable garments with so much unction. It must be a friend of some sort, but then who would, or could, be a friend to so diabolical a creature as that is, even to look at?" Just then the excitement of the boat's arrival caught up the crowd, and I had all my attention engaged in my own work, in piloting myself well to the front, in rushing across the gangway on to the vessel, and by a judicious bribe of half-a-sovereign getting one of the stewards to conduct me straight away to the girl I was in search of--Miss Camille Velasquon--who greeted me with one of the prettiest and most honest of Spanish faces I had ever seen, and who shook my hand as warmly as though we had been friends in the long ago, for years and years. In age she could not, certainly, have been more than twenty, but there was a certain air of good style about her and her clothes that suggested wealth and a consciousness of considerable social importance.