let him go, his head drooped, and then he turned and looked
at me with a silly, vacuous smile. I looked away hurriedly; this was not
a man with whom I cared to share experience.

The process was repeated. The next victim was a big, rubicund,
healthy-looking man, clean shaved, with light-blue eyes that were
slightly magnified by the glasses of his gold-mounted spectacles. He,
too, had been reading a newspaper--the _Evening Standard_--until the
child's gaze claimed his attention, and he, too, was held motionless by
that strange, appraising stare. But when he was released, his surprise
found vent in words. "This," I thought, "is the man accustomed to act."

"A very remarkable child, ma'am," he said, addressing the thin,
ascetic-looking mother.

II

The mother's appearance did not convey the impression of poverty. She
was, indeed, warmly, decently, and becomingly clad. She wore a long
black coat, braided and frogged; it had the air of belonging to an older
fashion, but the material of it was new. And her bonnet, trimmed with
jet ornaments growing on stalks that waved tremulously--that, also, was
a modern replica of an older mode. On her hands were black thread
gloves, somewhat ill-fitting.

Her face was not that of a country woman. The thin, high-bridged nose,
the fallen cheeks, the shadows under eyes gloomy and retrospective--these
were marks of the town; above all, perhaps, that sallow greyness of the
skin which speaks of confinement....

The child looked healthy enough. Its great bald head shone resplendently
like a globe of alabaster.

"A very remarkable child, ma'am," said the rubicund man who sat facing
the woman.

The woman twitched her untidy-looking black eyebrows, her head trembled
slightly and set the jet fruit of her bonnet dancing and nodding.

"Yes, sir," she replied.

"Very remarkable," said the man, adjusting his spectacles and leaning
forward. His action had an air of deliberate courage; he was justifying
his fortitude after that temporary aberration.

I watched him a little nervously. I remembered my feelings when, as a
child, I had seen some magnificent enter the lion's den in a travelling
circus. The failure on my right was, also, absorbed in the spectacle; he
stared, open-mouthed, his eyes blinking and shifting.

The other three occupants of the compartment, sitting on the same side
as the woman, back to the engine, dropped papers and magazines and
turned their heads, all interest. None