Then, at the proper time, she went back to the Grand Central, recovered her bag, bought herself two or three magazines and a bar of chocolate, and boarded the train. For all that she tried to be so cool and sensible, she could not help feeling a queer little thrill of excitement. Her quest had begun, and she could not in any way foresee the end. VIII Now it certainly was not Lexy’s way to take any great interest in strange young men. There was not a trace of coquetry in her honest heart, and she had always looked upon the little flirtations of her friends with distaste and wonder. “_I’m_ not romantic!” she had said more than once. She believed that. She would have denied indignantly that her present mission was romantic. She thought it a matter-of-course thing which she was in honor bound to do for her friend Caroline Enderby. She felt that she was very cool and practical about it, and a mighty sensible sort of girl altogether. Certainly she saw the young man on the train, for her alert glance saw pretty well everything. She saw him, and she thought she had never set eyes on a handsomer man. He was very tall, and slenderly and strongly built. He was dressed with fastidious perfection, and he had an air of marked distinction. In short, he was a man whom any one would look at—and remember; but Lexy, the unromantic girl, thought him inferior to the blue-eyed Mr. Houseman. She preferred young Houseman’s blunt, sunburned face to the dark and haughty one of this stranger. She simply was not interested in dark and haughty strangers, however distinguished and handsome. She looked at this one, and then returned to her magazines. She had a weakness for detective stories, and she was reading one now—reading it in the proper spirit, uncritical and absorbed. Whenever the train stopped at a station, she glanced up, and more than once, as she turned her head, she caught the stranger’s eye. She wondered, later on, why she hadn’t had some sort of premonition. People in stories always did. They always recognized at once the other people who were going to be in the story with them; but Lexy did not. Even toward the end of the journey, when she and the stranger were the only ones left in the car, she was not aware of any interest in him. Even when he, too, got out at Wyngate, Lexy was not specially interested. It was only a little after five o’clock, but it was dark already on that rainy afternoon, and the only thing that interested her just then was the sight of a solitary taxi drawn up beside the platform. Bag in hand, she hurried toward it, but the stranger got there before her. When she arrived, he was speaking to the driver.