ring blankly
and blackly out into the whizzing night. The predicament had come upon
him so suddenly that he had not until now found the opportunity to
analyse it in its entirety. The worst that could come of it, of course,
was the poor comfort of a night in a chair. He knew that it was a train
of sleeping-coaches--Ah! He suddenly remembered the luggage van! As a
last resort, he might find lodging among the trunks!

And then, too, there was something irritating in the suspicion that she
had laughed as if it were a huge joke--perhaps, even now, she was
doubled up in her narrow couch, stifling the giggle that would not be
suppressed.

When the _garde_ came back with the lugubrious information that nothing,
positively nothing, was to be had, it is painful to record that Brock
swore in a manner which won the deepest respect of the trainman.

"At four o'clock in the morning, M'sieur, an old gentleman and his wife
will get out at Strassburg, their destination. They are in this carriage
and you may take their compartment, if M'sieur will not object to
sleeping in a room just vacated by two mourners who to-day buried a
beloved son in Paris. They have kept all of the flowers in their--"

"Four o'clock! Good Lord, what am I to do till then?" groaned Brock,
glaring with unmanly hatred at the door of the Medcroft compartment.

"Perhaps Madame may be willing to take the upper--" ventured the guard
timorously, but Brock checked him with a peremptory gesture. He
proposed, instead, the luggage van, whereupon the guard burst into a
psalm of utter dejection. It was against the rules, irrevocably.

"Then I guess I'll have to sit here all night," said Brock faintly. He
was forgetting his English.

"If M'sieur will not occupy his own bed, yes," said the guard, shrugging
his shoulders and washing his hands of the whole incomprehensible
affair. "M'sieur will then be up to receive the Customs officers at the
frontier. Perhaps he will give me the keys to Madame's trunks, so that
she may not be disturbed."

"Ask her for 'em yourself," growled Brock, after one dazed moment of
dismay.

The hours crawled slowly by. He paced the length of the wriggling
corridor a hundred times, back and forth; he sat on every window-seat in
the carriage; he nodded and dozed and groaned, and laughed at himself in
the deepest derision all through the dismal night. Daylight came at
four; he saw the sun rise for the first time in his life. He neither
enjoyed n