There was the sound of quick shuffling within, the door was opened, and I found myself face to face with her. I left it to the conductor to explain my presence, and entering, closed and bolted the door behind me. “I regret that I have been compelled to disturb you, but this is the only berth vacant,” I said in English in a tone of apology, for I noticed that her black eyes flashed inquiringly at me, and therefore deemed it best to be on friendly terms with her. “Don’t mention it,” she answered quite affably. “I’m pleased that you’re English. I feared some horrid foreign woman would be put in to be my travelling-companion. Are you going far?” “To the frontier,” I responded vaguely. The extent of my journey depended upon the length of hers. Then after a further exchange of courtesies we prepared for the night, and entered our narrow berths, she choosing the upper one and I the lower. As far as I could judge she was nearly fifty, still extremely handsome, her beauty being of the Southern type, and her black hair and coiffure, with huge tortoise-shell comb, giving her a Spanish appearance. She wore several beautiful rings, and I noticed that on her neck, concealed by day by her bodice, was some tiny charm suspended by a thin golden chain. Her voice and bearing were those of an educated woman, and she was buxom without being beefy. The roar of the train and the grinding of the wheels as we whirled through those seventy-odd tunnels that separate Pisa from Genoa rendered sleep utterly impossible, so by mutual consent we continued our conversation. She seemed like the “Ancient Mariner”--needing some one to whom she could tell her story. She needed an audience who could realize the fine points of her play. From the first she seemed bursting with items about herself, little dreaming that I was acting as spy upon her. I secretly congratulated myself upon my astuteness, and proceeded to draw her out. Her slight accent puzzled me, but it was due, I discovered, to the fact that her mother had been Portuguese. She seemed to label everything with her own intellectual acquirements. To me, a perfect stranger, she chatted during that night journey about her fine figure and her power over men,--about her ambitions and her friends; but her guardian interfered with her friends. He, her guardian, was an old man and jealous, had her money invested in America, and would not allow her to look at a man. If she did look at men she received no money. She was not forty, she told me, and he, her guardian, who was also in the train, was over seventy. When she was not telling me the story of her loves, and her father, mother, and step-father, she filled in the time by telling me about some man whom she called Frank, who had a pretty-faced wife addicted to the illicit consumption of brandy.