train? Or the imagination to believe that you'd take it without us--you
and he all alone--instead of waiting quietly in the station till we DID
manage to meet you?"

Lily's colour rose: it was growing clear to her that Bertha was pursuing
an object, following a line she had marked out for herself. Only, with
such a doom impending, why waste time in these childish efforts to avert
it? The puerility of the attempt disarmed Lily's indignation: did it not
prove how horribly the poor creature was frightened?

"No; by our simply all keeping together at Nice," she returned.

"Keeping together? When it was you who seized the first opportunity to
rush off with the Duchess and her friends? My dear Lily, you are not a
child to be led by the hand!"

"No--nor to be lectured, Bertha, really; if that's what you are doing to
me now."

Mrs. Dorset smiled on her reproachfully. "Lecture you--I? Heaven forbid!
I was merely trying to give you a friendly hint. But it's usually the
other way round, isn't it? I'm expected to take hints, not to give them:
I've positively lived on them all these last months."

"Hints--from me to you?" Lily repeated.

"Oh, negative ones merely--what not to be and to do and to see. And I
think I've taken them to admiration. Only, my dear, if you'll let me say
so, I didn't understand that one of my negative duties was NOT to warn
you when you carried your imprudence too far."

A chill of fear passed over Miss Bart: a sense of remembered treachery
that was like the gleam of a knife in the dusk. But compassion, in a
moment, got the better of her instinctive recoil. What was this
outpouring of senseless bitterness but the tracked creature's attempt to
cloud the medium through which it was fleeing? It was on Lily's lips to
exclaim: "You poor soul, don't double and turn--come straight back to me,
and we'll find a way out!" But the words died under the impenetrable
insolence of Bertha's smile. Lily sat silent, taking the brunt of it
quietly, letting it spend itself on her to the last drop of its
accumulated falseness; then, without a word, she rose and went down to
her cabin.

Chapter 3

Miss Bart's telegram caught Lawrence Selden at the door of his hotel; and
having read it, he turned back to wait for Dorset. The message
necessarily left large gaps for conjecture; but all that he had recently
heard and seen made these but too easy to fill in. On the whole he was
surprised; for though he had perceived t