Helen was silent, unresisting, unresponsive, her face like ill-moulded clay, and Henriette a personification of apology to Phil. "According to story-books, Peter may yet fall on his knees and beg you to take his fortune," she added to Phil. "So much for Peter Smithers. He doesn't worry you, does he? It's delightful having seventeenth cousins like you." "And like you!" he replied to the challenge. "And you will not let me miss the train." They had time to walk and his bag had already gone. Helen was subdued, remaining with her uncle behind Phil and Henriette. "Remember at Mervaux, the sixth of August!" Henriette called from the platform. "I await your mother's invitation," Phil replied. His last view of her was the uplifted arm as she waved her handkerchief. Of course he had said that he would return to Truckleford now that he had found the way and the vicar even talked of accepting the invitation to Longfield, which is the way of such partings. But America is far away. Philip was alone in the compartment, very much alone as pictures recollected from the down journey passed before his mind. The glance across the aisle at the first meeting; Henriette's face reflected in the mirror beside his; her figure preceding him along the path as they ascended the hill above the village; little confidences on the walk to the station. These are well-known symptoms. Acting as his own diagnostician, this modern youth only four weeks from the cactus country thought: "I wonder if I have been hit! And Helen? I don't quite make her out. She's not uninteresting, though. I wonder how long it will take Henriette to do a portrait! I hope she is one of those painstaking artists who has intervals of rest and conversation. But maybe Madame Ribot won't write to me," scepticism which he dismissed as unpleasant. It stood to reason that the mother of such a girl as Henriette would do anything that she wanted. "I should, myself," he decided. To him as an American the assassination of the heir to a European throne and his consort, which he read in the newspapers that evening, had the thrill of horror of a railroad or a steamship disaster. It could have none of the seriousness that it had to every European, who had that "balance of power," as they called it, in the back of the head of his individual existence. He read; he sympathised in a generic twinge of pity, and was little further concerned. In the afternoon of the next day he should be in Holland and in the evening, had he not chosen to spend a few days with Rembrandt and wooden shoes, he could have been in Berlin, a journey in distance equivalent to that from Buffalo to New York or Chicago to Omaha.