ught to be," said Miss Winchelsea.

Presently the conductor discovered Helen's attempt at a corner in
carriages. "Room for five," he bawled with a parallel translation on
his fingers. A party of four together--mother, father, and two
daughters--blundered in, all greatly excited. "It's all right, Ma, you
let me," said one of the daughters, hitting her mother's bonnet with
a handbag she struggled to put in the rack. Miss Winchelsea detested
people who banged about and called their mother "Ma." A young man
travelling alone followed. He was not at all "touristy" in his costume,
Miss Winchelsea observed; his Gladstone bag was of good pleasant leather
with labels reminiscent of Luxembourg and Ostend, and his boots, though
brown, were not vulgar. He carried an overcoat on his arm. Before these
people had properly settled in their places, came an inspection of
tickets and a slamming of doors, and behold! they were gliding out of
Charing Cross station on their way to Rome.

"Fancy!" cried Fanny, "we are going to Rome, my dear! Rome! I don't seem
to believe it, even now."

Miss Winchelsea suppressed Fanny's emotions with a little smile, and
the lady who was called "Ma" explained to people in general why they
had "cut it so close" at the station. The two daughters called her "Ma"
several times, toned her down in a tactless effective way, and drove her
at last to the muttered inventory of a basket of travelling requisites.
Presently she looked up. "Lor'!" she said, "I didn't bring THEM!"
Both the daughters said "Oh, Ma!" but what "them" was did not appear.
Presently Fanny produced Hare's Walks in Rome, a sort of mitigated
guide-book very popular among Roman visitors; and the father of the two
daughters began to examine his books of tickets minutely, apparently in
a search after English words. When he had looked at the tickets for a
long time right way up, he turned them upside down. Then he produced
a fountain pen and dated them with considerable care. The young man,
having completed an unostentatious survey of his fellow travellers,
produced a book and fell to reading. When Helen and Fanny were looking
out of the window at Chiselhurst--the place interested Fanny because the
poor dear Empress of the French used to live there--Miss Winchelsea took
the opportunity to observe the book the young man held. It was not a
guide-book, but a little thin volume of poetry--BOUND. She glanced at
his face--it seemed a refined pleasant face to