e could never give warning. The Atlantic
Ocean was between her and those who had loved and protected her all
her short life, and the carriage was bearing her onwards to the home in
which she was to live alone as this man's companion to the end of her
existence.

She made no further propitiatory efforts, but sat and stared in simple
blankness at the country, which seemed to increase in loveliness at each
new point of view. Sometimes she saw sweet wooded, rolling lands made
lovelier by the homely farmhouses and cottages enclosed and sheltered by
thick hedges and trees; once or twice they drove past a park enfolding
a great house guarded by its huge sentinel oaks and beeches; once the
carriage passed through an adorable little village, where children
played on the green and a square-towered grey church seemed to watch
over the steep-roofed cottages and creeper-covered vicarage. If she had
been a happy American tourist travelling in company with impressionable
friends, she would have broken into ecstatic little exclamations of
admiration every five minutes, but it had been driven home to her that
to her present companion, to whom nothing was new, her rapture would
merely represent the crudeness which had existed in contentment in a
brown-stone house on a noisy thoroughfare, through a life which had been
passed tramping up and down numbered streets and avenues.

They approached at last a second village with a green, a grass-grown
street and the irregular red-tiled cottages, which to the unaccustomed
eye seemed rather to represent studies for sketches than absolute
realities. The bells in the church tower broke forth into a chime and
people appeared at the doors of the cottages. The men touched their
foreheads as the carriage passed, and the children made bobbing
curtsies. Sir Nigel condescended to straighten himself a trifle in his
seat, and recognised the greetings with the stiff, half-military salute.
The poor girl at his side felt that he put as little feeling as possible
into the movement, and that if she herself had been a bowing villager
she would almost have preferred to be wholly ignored. She looked at him
questioningly.

"Are they--must _I_?" she began.

"Make some civil recognition," answered Sir Nigel, as if he were
instructing an ignorant child. "It is customary."

So she bowed and tried to smile, and the joyous clamour of the bells
brought the awful lump into her throat again. It reminded her of
the ringin