s carriage, wedged in between her father and a
heavy-featured priest; who diligently read a little dogs-eared breviary.
Opposite was a meek, weasel-faced bourgeois, with a managing wife, who
ordered him about; then came a bushy-whiskered Englishman and a newly
married couple, while in the further corner, nearly hidden from view
by the burly priest, lurked a gentle-looking Sister of Mercy, and a
mischievous and fidgety school boy. She watched them all as in a dream
of pain. Presently the priest left off muttering and began to snore,
and sleep fell, too, upon the occupants of the opposite seat. The little
weasel-faced man looked most uncomfortable, for the Englishman used him
as a prop on one side and the managing wife nearly overwhelmed him
on the other; he slept fitfully, and always with the air of a martyr,
waking up every few minutes and vainly trying to shake off his burdens,
who invariably made stifled exclamations and sunk back again.

"That would have been funny once," thought Erica to herself. "How I
should have laughed. Shall I always be like this all the rest of my
life, seeing what is ludicrous, yet with all the fun taken out of it?"

But her brain reeled at the thought of the "rest of life." The blank of
bereavement, terrible to all, was absolute and eternal to her, and
this was her first great sorrow. She had known pain, and privation, and
trouble and anxiety, but actual anguish never. Now it had come to her
suddenly, irrevocably, never to be either more or less; perhaps to be
fitted on as a garment as time wore on, and to become a natural part of
her life; but always to be the same, a blank often felt, always present,
till at length her end came and she too passed away into the great
Silence.

Despair--the deprivation of all hope--is sometimes wild, but oftener
calm with a deathly calmness. Erica was absolutely still--she scarcely
moved or spoke during the long weary journey to Calais. Twice only
did she feel the slightest desire for any outward vent. At the Amiens
station the school boy in the corner, who had been growing more restless
and excited every hour, sprung from the carriage to greet a small crowd
of relations who were waiting to welcome him. She saw him rush to
his mother, heard a confused affectionate babel of inquiries,
congratulations, laughter. Oh! To think of that happy light-heartedness
and the contrast between it and her grief. The laughter seemed
positively to cut her; she could have sc