Later on however when darkness had stolen like a pall over the landscape, when weary with want of sleep and worn out with excitement and anxiety, the glad sense of escape died away, she grew unutterably sad-hearted and forlorn. At the other end of the carriage two men wrangled together over the vexed question of having the window open or shut. A fat French lady went to sleep and snored monotonously, just opposite her a young couple on their honeymoon laughed and chatted in low tones with much outward demonstration, while beyond a young mother sat with her baby in her arms, an air of placid content on her face. Never before had Evereld felt such a unit, never before had she realised how really alone she was in the world. She shuddered to think what would have become of her if Ralph had never crossed her path. And then as the engine throbbed on through the darkness all those terrors of imagining from which her healthy uneventful life had so far been exempt, laid strong hold upon her, and made the night hideous. She saw Ralph lying ill and forlorn in a fever hospital. She saw him lying with pale lips and hands folded in the awful calm of death. She saw herself alone and brokenhearted, struggling to make something of her maimed life and failing in the attempt. She saw Sir Matthew tracking her out and carrying her back to the house in Queen Anne’s Gate. Worst of all she saw herself standing in church and passively allowing herself to be married to Bruce Wylie. She had just reached this climax in her miserable thoughts when as the train stopped at the wayside station the door of the carriage was opened and in came a very aged priest whose rusty black raiment had an old and somewhat countrified look. His thin, worn face might have been stern in youth, but the passing years had mellowed it, and like Southey’s holly tree what had once been sharp and aggressive had grown tender as it more nearly approached heaven. His keen eyes seemed to take in the occupants of the carriage in one glance and he at once divined that the sad little English girl in the corner was for some reason feeling altogether desolate. He took the vacant place beside her and began to unwrap a package which he carried. It proved to be a cage containing a bullfinch, and Evereld watched with interest the scared fluttering of the bird and the gentle reassuring face of the old man as he tried to pacify it. “It is its first journey,” he said glancing at her. “The unaccustomed has terrors for us all. It will soon understand that it is quite safe. Eh, Fifi? Should I let any harm happen to thee, thou foolish one?” “Can it sing any tune?” said Evereld. “We had one in London that sang a bit of the National Anthem.”