The _Lorraine_ had just entered the port of Hâvre after an excellent passage across the Atlantic. As usual, her passenger list was a full one, and bore many names well known in the worlds of high finance and fashion. The decks were crowded with pretty women in brilliant toilettes and clean-shaven, keen-faced men in check cloth caps, a typically American company, not to mention a minority of other nationalities—Frenchmen, Englishmen, heavily built Germans, with a sprinkling of Spaniards and Italians and even a half-dozen bronzed Asiatics, a cosmopolitan assemblage. The great ship lay alongside the huge customs shed, at the further side of which was drawn up the special boat-train destined to convey the liner’s first class passengers to Paris, and only waiting the latter’s release from the formalities of the _douane_. Now all was ready, and the heavy train got into motion, threaded its way at a snail’s pace through the vast labyrinth of docks and warehouses, made a brief halt at the Hâvre railway station to pick up a few travellers having special permission to avail themselves of this express service, then little by little gathering speed, began the headlong race that was only to end 300 kilometres from the start at the Gare Saint-Lazare in the very heart of the capital. Very soon _déjeuner_ was served in the dining coach. “How pretty the country is,” said Mrs. Silas K. Bigelow, enthusiastically; she was a young and charming American, who sat with eyes never leaving the window, gazing with admiring curiosity at the fertile plains of Normandy whirling past. Her _vis-à-vis_ at her table in the dining car, Mr. Van Buren, one of the most famous of New York’s multi-millionaires, less enamoured of landscape than his poetical fellow-countrywoman, insisted on his companion devoting a less perfunctory attention to the meal. The wine steward approached: “What wine will the ladies and gentlemen drink—Saint Emilion, Pommard, extra dry?” Mrs. Bigelow’s neighbour, a superb creature, with hair as black as ink and eyes of an opalescent green, shook her head in reply to the enquiring glance of her companion, a young Englishman, with smooth cheeks and close-cropped hair. “No, my dear Ascott,” she declared, “now we are ashore again, I want no more of those heady beverages. All very well at sea, but not good for my health now. Order me some mineral water, will you?” Ascott looked round in search of the wine steward, but the man was already at the opposite end of the car, booking the orders of the other tables. “Sorry, Princess,” the young Englishman excused himself; “directly the man comes back, I will give him your order. Is there any particular kind you prefer?” But the Princess Sonia Danidoff answered the question only with a careless wave of the hand and a brief: “Oh! I don’t know; I hate having to choose.”