mpared their respective tastes in the
matter of trees and lakes. While talking exclusively of what they saw,
so that any one might have overheard them, they felt that the compact
between them was made firmer and deeper by the number of people who
passed them and suspected nothing of the kind. The question of Ralph's
cottage and future was not mentioned again.

CHAPTER XXVI

Although the old coaches, with their gay panels and the guard's horn,
and the humors of the box and the vicissitudes of the road, have long
moldered into dust so far as they were matter, and are preserved in the
printed pages of our novelists so far as they partook of the spirit,
a journey to London by express train can still be a very pleasant and
romantic adventure. Cassandra Otway, at the age of twenty-two, could
imagine few things more pleasant. Satiated with months of green fields
as she was, the first row of artisans' villas on the outskirts of London
seemed to have something serious about it, which positively increased
the importance of every person in the railway carriage, and even, to her
impressionable mind, quickened the speed of the train and gave a note of
stern authority to the shriek of the engine-whistle. They were bound for
London; they must have precedence of all traffic not similarly destined.
A different demeanor was necessary directly one stepped out upon
Liverpool Street platform, and became one of those preoccupied and hasty
citizens for whose needs innumerable taxi-cabs, motor-omnibuses, and
underground railways were in waiting. She did her best to look
dignified and preoccupied too, but as the cab carried her away, with
a determination which alarmed her a little, she became more and more
forgetful of her station as a citizen of London, and turned her head
from one window to another, picking up eagerly a building on this side
or a street scene on that to feed her intense curiosity. And yet, while
the drive lasted no one was real, nothing was ordinary; the crowds, the
Government buildings, the tide of men and women washing the base of the
great glass windows, were all generalized, and affected her as if she
saw them on the stage.

All these feelings were sustained and partly inspired by the fact that
her journey took her straight to the center of her most romantic world.
A thousand times in the midst of her pastoral landscape her thoughts
took this precise road, were admitted to the house in Chelsea, and went
directly up