Page:The Strand Magazine (Volume 24).djvu/97

Rh time!" said he, with courteous carelessness. "Hadn't you given me up?"

"IT WAS THE YOUNG MAN IN GREY."

Lily gave a little gasp, and then understood he was assuming the rôle of brother or friend to give himself the right of protecting her.

"Yes," she told him. "I had given up hope altogether," and there was real truth in the words.

Watching his face intently, she read his wishes.

"Will you not come and sit over here?" she asked him, and began clearing her things away from the place beside her.

He changed places in the most natural way possible, and appeared to pay no attention at all to the traveller in the far corner. But Lily knew that the move had been made for the very purpose of observing him, and by a little sign she indicated to the young man in grey the pistol lying under the Frenchman's hand, and now half hidden by a fold of his cloak.

The man was still smoking, while he stared in front of him with an assumed air of mental preoccupation, although every now and then a glint from his flickering eye fell upon his companions in the carriage.

The train every moment was increasing in speed. The carriage swayed and rattled, the telegraph-posts leaped past in quick succession, an express coming from the other direction seemed one long line of glittering windows, one long, continuous roar.

Had the young man in grey seen the pistol? Lily could not be sure, for he gave no answering sign, and his manner was exceedingly bright and irrelevant.

"By Jove, that was a very close thing," said he. "And if I hadn't come by this train I don't think the girls would ever have forgiven me. They make such a point of it. But now I want you," he continued, "to keep a look-out on the opposite window." We are going to pass directly a very extraordinary sight. We are going to pass a house built without any front to it, by a man who is consumptive, and hopes to cure himself on the open-air system. It looks precisely like a dolls' house with the door open. You can see into all the rooms. There! There it is! Do you see it?" he cried eagerly, getting up to point it out, and Lily jumped up and looked with all her eyes, and the Frenchman half rose and looked too.

Was there such a house as the young man described? Lily could not tell, for the train had reached full speed, and the whole countryside wheeled and curved and spun into view, and reeled away again behind them, before she had time to detect any one particular thing. But in the same instant that her bewildered