y at home--and in such a home! There were some
things which came uppermost again and again--but of them all he dwelt
most fixedly upon the recollection of moving about in the greenhouses
and conservatories, with that tall, stately, fair Lady Cressage for his
guide, and watching her instead of the flowers that she pointed out. Of
what she had told him, not a syllable stuck in his mind, but the music
of the voice lingered in his ears.

"And she is old Kervick's daughter!" he said to himself more than once.

CHAPTER VIII

IT may be that every other passenger in that morning train to London
nursed either a silent rage, or declaimed aloud to fellow-sufferers in
indignation, at the time consumed in making what, by the map, should be
so brief a journey. In Thorpe's own compartment, men spoke with savage
irony of cyclists alleged to be passing them on the road, and exchanged
dark prophecies as to the novelties in imbecility and helplessness which
the line would be preparing for the Christmas holidays. The old joke
about people who had gone travelling years before, and were believed
to be still lost somewhere in the recesses of Kent, revived itself amid
gloomy approbation. The still older discussion as to whether the South
Eastern or the Brighton was really the worst followed naturally in its
wake, and occupied its accustomed half-hour--complicated, however, upon
this occasion, by the chance presence of a loquacious stranger who said
he lived on the Chatham-and-Dover, and who rejected boisterously the
idea that any other railway could be half so bad.

The intrusion of this outsider aroused instant resentment, and the
champions of the South Eastern and the Brighton, having piled up
additional defenses in the shape of personal recollections of delay
and mismanagement quite beyond belief, made a combined attack upon the
newcomer. He was evidently incapable, their remarks implied, of knowing
a bad railway when he saw one. To suggest that the characterless and
inoffensive Chatham-and-Dover, so commonplace in its tame virtues,
was to be mentioned in the same breath with the daringly inventive
and resourceful malefactors whose rendezvous was London Bridge, showed
either a weak mind or a corrupt heart. Did this man really live on the
Dover line at all? Angry countenances plainly reflected the doubt.

But to Thorpe the journey seemed short enough--almost too short.
The conversation interested him not at all; if he had ever kn