uld keep its institutions to itself and share
its pretty girls, and the professor told him that he knew more about the
latter than the former. There were not many pretty girls on the platform
this morning, though he remarked one rather pleasing young person who
sat idly on a pile of luggage and fixed large, speculative, innocently
assured eyes upon him when he went by, while near her her mother and a
tawny sister disputed bitterly with a porter. Most of the ladies who
hastened to and fro seemed, while very energetic, also very jaded. They
were packed as tightly with experiences as their boxes with contraband
clothing, and they had both, perhaps, rather heavily on their minds,
wondering, it was probable, how they were to get them through. Some of
them, strenuous, eye-glassed and scholastic, looked, however, as they
marshalled their pathetically lean luggage, quite innocent of material
trophies.

Among these alien and unfamiliar visages, Gregory caught sight suddenly
of one that was alien yet recognizable. He had seen the melancholy,
simian features before, and after a moment he placed the neat, black
person, walking beside a truck piled high with enormous boxes, as
Louise, Madame von Marwitz's maid. To recognise Louise was to think of
Miss Woodruff. Gregory looked around the platform with a new interest.

Miss Woodruff was nowhere to be seen, but a new element pervaded the
dingy place, and it hardly needed the presence of four or five richly
dressed ladies bearing sheaves of flowers, or that of two silk-hatted
impresario-looking gentlemen with Jewish noses, to lead Gregory to infer
that the element was Madame von Marwitz's, and that he had,
inadvertently, fallen upon the very morning of her departure. Already an
awareness and an expectancy was abroad that reminded him of that in the
concert hall. The contagion of celebrity had made itself felt even
before the celebrity herself was visible; but, in another moment, Madame
von Marwitz had appeared upon the platform, surrounded by cohorts of
friends. Dressed in a long white cloak and flowing in sables, a white
lace veil drooping about her shoulders, a sumptuous white feather
curving from her brow to her back, she moved amidst the scene like a
splendid, dreamy ship entering some grimy Northern harbour.

Mrs. Forrester, on heels as high as a fairy-godmother's and wearing a
strange velvet cloak and a stranger velvet bonnet, trotted beside her;
Sir Alliston was on the other ha