would be for the future!

There were Grace's sandwiches. To divert her thoughts she took the
little packet from the bag which held her money and jewels, and drew
out also her silver flask. Years ago her doctor had told her never to
travel without a little brandy. She looked at the sandwiches, unscrewed
the flask, but found sight and scent to be enough that morning, and put
both aside.

It had seemed a long journey, but now London was near. They stopped at
Broxbourne. Auntie was not quite sure if this station they flew by was
Ponder's End or Angel Road; she put her head out of the window to try
to catch the name on the lamps and benches, failed to do so, and lay
back again in her corner.

What was that? A stirring, a bulging outward of the valances of the
opposite seat. Something was emerging. A man. Dragging himself forth on
his stomach, gathering himself up to his hands and knees, rising to his
full height, collapsing, a dusty, degraded bundle of clothes, in the
further corner of the carriage.

"Guard!" shrieked Auntie. "Gua----!"

The word died on her stiff blue lips. She, too, collapsed in her
corner, and lay stonily staring at the face staring back at her: a face
with desperation in its hunted eyes, with black chin, and chalk-white
cheek and brow, and a mouth restlessly mumbling with no sound.

Beside the man, on the flat-topped division of the seat, a pistol lay;
but the fingers of the small white hand which held it were nerveless.
In his bearing was no menace--only the unstrung droop of despair.

So they faced each other without a word--the man and woman who for the
last two days had played the _roles_ of attentive host and gratified
guest.

And the train sped on. Away from the sunny little house, the dainty,
capable housewife, the security, the shelter, the heaven of home; away
from peace and guiltlessness; away from a life in which the "gnat-like
buzzings of little cares" had once been its heaviest burden, to a life
in death of danger, of degradation, of bottomless despair.

As the train slackened speed for the next station, the man arose,
dropped the pistol in his pocket; his hand stole out to the handle of
the door. Cautiously he looked forth over flat landscape of building
site, of brickfield, of the huge tanks and lush vegetation of sewage
farms. Gently he pushed the door a little open, and, holding it,
paused, as more slowly, slower still the train sped on.

There was a shrinking touch upon his