g the arrival of the Folkestone boat-train. She attracted
considerable attention and excited adverse criticism amongst the other
ladies present not only because of her personal charm but by reason of
her dress. She wore a coat of black coney seal trimmed with white fox,
and a little cap of the same, and her high-legged boots had white calf
tops. Her complexion alone doomed her to the undying enmity of her sex,
for the humid morning air had enhanced that clear freshness which quite
naturally and properly annoyed every other woman who beheld it.

Several pressmen and photographers mingled with the groups along the
platform, for the party with which Paul had been touring the French and
British fronts included at least two other notable personages; and
Bassett, Paul's press agent, said to Yvonne: "You will smile across a
million breakfast tables to-morrow morning, Mrs. Mario, and from a
thousand cinema screens later in the week."

Yvonne smiled there and then, a charming little one-sided smile, for she
was really a very pretty woman in spite of her reputation as a beauty.
"Modern journalism leaves nothing to the imagination," she replied.

"And very wisely. So few people have any."

They paced slowly along the platform. Excepting the porters who leaned
against uptilted trucks and stared stolidly up the line, a spirit of
furtive unrest had claimed everyone. People who meet trains always look
so guilty, avoiding each other's glances and generally behaving as
though their presence were a pure accident; periodically consulting the
station clock as who should say, "If this train is not signalled very
shortly I must be off. My time is of value." There is another type of
course, much more rare, who appears at the last moment from some
subterranean stairway. He is always running and his glance is wild. As
the passengers begin to descend from the train he races along the
platform, now and again pausing in his career and standing on tiptoe in
order to look over the heads of the people in front of him. To every
official he meets he says: "This train _is_ the Folkestone train?" He
rarely waits for a reply.

Indeed, at a modern railway station, as of old at the city gates, the
fatuity of human aspirations may be studied advantageously. Soldiers
were there, at Victoria, hundreds of them, lined up on a distant
platform, and they symbolised the spirit of an age which exalts
Mechanism to the pinnacle of a deity and which offers itself a