The bell rang, and Bulstrode found himself helping the lady into his own compartment. The guard shut the door, which closed with the customary soft thick sound of a lock setting, and pasted over the window the exclusive and forbidding paper--RESERVED. Then it was in his corner by the window, once chimney pots and suburbs left behind, that the traveller to Westboro' watched the landscape with the pale, transparent smoke from the little farms floating like veils across the golden atmosphere; the slow winding streams between low-bushed, rosy shores, and red-tinged thickets; the flocks of rooks across fields long harvested: the flocks of sheep on the gently swelling downs. "England, England," he murmured, as if it were a refrain in whose melody he found much charm, as if his traditions of insular forebears might in some way be recalled in the word, as if it spoke more than a chance traveller's appreciation for the melodious countryside. He had letters, read them, and put his correspondence aside, then comfortably settling himself in his corner, began to construct for himself a picture of Westboro', whose lines and architecture he knew from photographs, although he had never been there. It was agreeable to him as he mused to fancy himself for the first time with Mrs. Falconer in England, in the country they preferred to all the others in the Old World. They were in sympathy with English life and manners, and here, if (oh, of course, a world of "ifs")--here no doubt they would both choose to live when abroad, were there any choice for them of mutual life. Westboro' is Elizabethan and of vast proportions. The house would naturally be very full--how much of the time would they discover for themselves? There would decidedly be occasions. Mary Falconer did not hunt, and although Jimmy Bulstrode could recall having postulated that "there are only two real occupations for a real man--to kill and to love," he also knew what precedence he himself gave, and how little the sportsmen of Westboro' would have cause to fear his concurrence if by lucky chance in more or less of solitude he should find his lady there. It was months since he had seen Mrs. Falconer--months. It had been a long exile. Each time that he started out to run away, it was just that--running away--it was with a curious wonder whether or not on his return he should not find a change. Time and absence--above all, time, worked extraordinary infidelities in other people. Why should they two believe themselves immune? The long months might have altered _her_. The mischief was yet to be seen. But when in the list of noble names he had in his hand, his eyes fell upon the single prefix--_Mrs._--and found it followed by _The Name_, if he had not sincerely known before, his pulse at sight of the written words told Jimmy that he had not, at all events, changed!