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in a pocket which buttoned, and was silent for a space. After a while, however, a large station gave him the opportunity of saying to Lydia that the last time he was there he had come to escort a fellow-soldier to the gaol. Lydia’s expression of horror evidently pleased him, for he promptly embarked on details of various sad moral cases he had known in the past three years. The way some of them went on, it appeared, was terrible; but
he
made nothing of that line. No!
He
meant to get on,
he
did; he was going to be an officer before he was done. Lydia hoped that this return upon his original theme meant that his subject-matter was exhausted, and he certainly turned to thewindow and gazed out upon the passing scenery as though such was the case. But against her will Lydia observed that his attention to the scenery was more pronounced when the train was passing some dark wood or bluff which made the window into a reflector; when the landscape was not thus helpful he jerked himself abruptly round and threw out to the alarmed Lydia some spicy anecdote or other which was often—perhaps fortunately—drowned in the roar of the train.
    At length the little cosmos of the train approached Lydia’s destination. The soldier resumed his equipment with a tremendous clanking, and all the women in the carriage fidgeted about their hand-luggage, with the exception of the girl in the brown coat. She put on her tam-o’-shanter, but seemed unconcerned as to luggage till the last moment, when she suddenly reached up to the rack above her head and took down a paper parcel—and not a very large one at that, as Lydia observed compassionately. The train drew up; for a few minutes there was a terrible hurly-burly of the kind Lydia most detested: she was buffeted about helplessly hither and thither, and had murmured “Foyle Tower” vainly into the ears of several heedless drivers before at last she found herself seated in a hot and crowded station bus which was said to pass the place she wanted. The bus throbbed impatiently; just as it was about to start the girl in the brown coat, looking serene and reserved as usual, was pushed in with helpful cries by the conductor, andsqueezed into the opposite seat. The soldier, Lydia was relieved to find, had disappeared.
    Almost the first place the bus called at was the shore side of a large hotel, which seemed, judging from its white stone frontage and extensive gardens, a very pretentious place indeed. To Lydia’s amazement the girl in the brown coat dismounted here. As she was wandering, irresolute but stolid, towards the entrance, she was intercepted by a uniformed porter, who with a lofty gesture waved her off towards a small side door. Lydia’s heart smote her as she realized that the child—for she was little more—had come to form part of the extra staff which the hotel was taking on for Easter; and this poignant impression persisted even when, ten minutes later, she found herself within the decorous and orderly precincts of Foyle Tower, with a card of rules hanging by her bedroom door. The incidents of the afternoon lay hot and confused in her mind, like those of a disorderly dream; but they were extraordinarily vivid, too. That absurd soldier! That poor child with the hole in her coat! But surely, thought Lydia, as the influence of Foyle Tower began to assert its sway, surely that hole could have been mended.
    2
    The night was dark. Lydia paced the uneven asphalt of the front—out of which the winter storms yearly tore huge jagged pieces—and listened rather mournfully to the monotonous rollof the sea on the pebbled shore. Various flashing beams from lighthouses in France, on Dungeness, at Dover, jewelled the sea at rhythmic intervals, but Lydia was not capable of deriving much solace from such sources. She was aware that the night air was warm and balmy, and that the scattered lights made a pretty scene, but this did not console her, as it would