The train was slowing, stopping. Its rumbling clatter subsided to a prolonged squeak that ended on a stillness within which sounded one against the other the rapid ticking of a watch and a steady rhythmic snore. No one stirred, and for a moment there was nothing but these sounds to witness that life went on. Then faintly and as if from very far away she heard the metallic clangours of a large high station and amidst them a thin clarion voice singing out an indistinguishable name. Some large sleeping provincial town signalling its importance; a milestone, marking off hours passed through that need not be braved again. Yet when the train moved on it seemed impossible even to imagine the ending of the night. She had no idea of how long she had sat hemmed and suffering, with nothing in her mind but snatches of song that would not be dismissed, with aching brow and burning eyeballs and a ceaselessly on-coming stupor that would not turn to sleep. And at the next stop with its echoing clangour and faintness of clarion voices she no longer desired somehow to get across the encumbered carriage and taste from a corridor window the sweet fresh air of the railway station so freely breathed by those who were crying in the night. * * * * * A numbness had crept into the movement of the train, as though, wearying it had ceased to clatter and were dropping into a doze. It was moving so quietly that the ticking of the watch again became audible. The wheels under the carriage seemed to be muffled and to labour, pushing heavily forward ... _Snow_. The journey across France ending on the heights along its eastern edge. Her drugged senses awoke bewailing Paris, gleaming now out of reach far away in the north, challenging with the memory of its glimpsed beauty whatever loveliness might be approaching through the night. * * * * * Again outside the stopping train a far-off voice but this time a jocund sound, ringing echoless in open air. In a moment through a lifted window it became a rousing summons. Blinds went up, and on the huddled forms emerging serene and bright-eyed from their hibernation a blueish light came in. The opened door admitted crisp sounds close at hand and air, advancing up the carriage. Upon the platform the air was motionless and yet, walked through, an intensity of movement—movement upon her face of millions of infinitesimal needles attacking. Mountain air “like wine,” but this effervescence was solid, holding one up, feeding every nerve. A little way down the platform she came upon the luggage, a few trunks set side by side on a counter, and saw at once that her portmanteau was not there. Anxiety dogging her steps. But this air, that reached, it seemed, to her very spirit, would not let her feel anxious.