nd angry questions, in
Italian, was flung in at them from the opened compartment door. To
this they paid not the slightest attention, for several moments. Frank
turned to her interrogators, smiled at them gently and impersonally,
and then shook her head impatiently, with an outthrust of the hands
which was meant to convey to them that each and every word they uttered
was quite incomprehensible to her.

The _capostazione_, who, by this time, had pushed into their
compartment, was heatedly demanding either their passports or their
tickets.

Frank, who had buried her face raptly in her armful of jonquils, looked
up at him with gentle exasperation.

"We are English," she said blankly. "English! We can't understand!"
And she returned to her flowers and her husband once more.

The two uniformed intruders conferred for a moment, while the
_conduttore_, on the platform outside, naturally enough expostulated
over the delay of the train.

"These fools--these aren't the two!" Frank heard the _capostazione_
declare, in Italian, under his breath, as they swung down on the
station platform. Then the shrill little thin-noted engine-whistle
sounded, the wheels began to turn, and they were once more speeding
through the white moonlight, deeper and deeper into Italy.

"I wonder," said Frank, after a long silence, "how often we shall be
able to do this sort of thing? I wonder how long luck--mere luck, will
be with us?"

"_Is_ it luck?" asked her husband. She was still leaning back on his
shoulder, with her hand clasping his. Accompanying her consciousness
of escape came a new lightness of spirit. There seemed to come over
her, too, a new sense of gratitude for the nearness of this sentient
and mysterious life, of this living and breathing man, that could both
command and satisfy some even more mysterious emotional hunger in her
own heart.

"Yes," she answered, as she laughed a little, almost contentedly;
"we're like the glass snake. We seem to break off at the point where
we're caught, and escape, and go on again as before. I was only
wondering how many times a glass snake can leave its tail in its
enemy's teeth, and still grow another one!"

And although she laughed again Durkin knew how thinly that covering of
facetiousness spread over her actual sobriety of character. It was
like a solitary drop of oil on quiet water--there was not much of it,
but what there was must always be on the surface.

In fact, her moo