It was a chilly night, the road rough, and progress slow. Luc’s weak sight slowly made out the other passengers. His mental preoccupation had been such that till now he had not noticed them. One, who sat opposite him, under the lamp, was an ordinary middle-aged citizen, wrapped in a frieze coat and wearing a grey wig. He was half asleep, and his head shook to and fro on his breast with the rattling of the coach. The remaining passenger was a woman, so muffled from head to foot in a dark mantle that face, figure, hands, and feet were hidden--probably she was asleep. Luc had never been in a public coach before. The close smell, the worn fittings, the near presence of strangers--it was all new to him, as were the joltings and lurching in the heavy leathers. He reflected that henceforth all his life would be as strange, as different as this from what he had hitherto known; that from now on he would have to consider things from another standpoint--the soldier, the noble existed no longer. He was a man broken in health, with very little longer to live, adventuring to Paris. He schooled himself to endure the monotony of the cold, the dim light, the two silent figures, the slow motion. He closed his eyes and endeavoured to sleep. His senses were slipping into a languid, bitter-sweet confusion, when a stinging blast of air roused him. He sat up, shivering and coughing. The window farthest from him had been opened, and a thin curl of mist, icy cold, entered the coach. The man opposite slept and nodded, and the lady by the open window held her head turned away, and seemed to be gazing out at the darkness. Luc’s courtesy would not permit him to ask her to close the window, though to have it wide to the night in such weather seemed folly. The cold crept up to him, and clung to him. Recollections of all that cold had meant in his life came to him: the cold in Bohemia; the cold outside Aix; even the delicate chill of evening in the garden off the Rue Deauville. And all these associations were with Carola Koklinska, and he recalled that she had told him how she used to lie shivering under the trees when she was a child--cold, cold, cold. Wherever her soul might be, her body was cold now, stiff in the frosty earth. He too, he shivered as he had not under the snows of Pürgitz. Again he closed his eyes, yet soon opened them. Now the window was shut. He stared, for he had not heard the sound of closing. When he reflected, he had not heard the sound of opening either, nor had the lady changed her attitude--and it was not possible that she could have pulled the thick strap, moved down or up the ponderous frame of wood, the heavy sheet of glass, without some sound, and without disturbing the folds of the cloak across her hands. Luc admitted to himself, with a little quiver, that his sight was more and more failing him. In these last few weeks he could not trust himself about objects even so near as was this window, that could never have been opened.