The Splendid Folly. Margaret Pedler
are not very old now," he interjected.
"I'm eighteen," she answered seriously.
"It's a great age," he acknowledged, with equal gravity.
Just then a waiter sped forward and with praiseworthy agility deposited their coffee on the table without spilling a drop, despite the swaying of the train, and Diana's fellow-traveller produced his cigarette-case.
"Will you smoke?" he asked.
She looked at the cigarettes longingly.
"Baroni's forbidden me to smoke," she said, hesitating a little. "Do you think—just one—would hurt my voice?"
The short black lashes flew up, and the light-grey eyes, like a couple of stars between black clouds, met his in irresistible appeal.
"I'm sure it wouldn't," he replied promptly. "After all, this is just an hour's playtime that we have snatched out of life. Let's enjoy every minute of it—we may never meet again."
Diana felt her heart contract in a most unexpected fashion.
"Oh, I hope we shall!" she exclaimed, with ingenuous warmth.
"It is not likely," he returned quietly. He struck a match and held it while she lit her cigarette, and for an instant their fingers touched. His teeth came down hard on his under-lip. "No, we mustn't meet again," he repeated in a low voice.
"Oh, well, you never know," insisted Diana, with cheerful optimism.
"People run up against each other in the most extraordinary fashion. And
I expect we shall, too."
"I don't think so," he said. "If I thought that we should—" He broke off abruptly, frowning.
"Why, I don't believe you want to meet me again!" exclaimed Diana, with a note in her voice like that of a hurt child.
"Oh, for that!" He shrugged his shoulders. "If we could have what we wanted in this world! Though, I mustn't complain—I have had this hour. And I wanted it!" he added, with a sudden intensity.
"So much that you propose to make it last you for the remainder of your life?"—smiling.
"It will have to," he answered grimly.
After dinner they made their way back from the restaurant car to their compartment, and noticing that she looked rather white and tired, he suggested that she should tuck herself up on the seat and go to sleep.
"But supposing I didn't wake at the right time?" she objected. "I might be carried past my station and find myself heaven knows where in the small hours of the morning! … I am sleepy, though."
"Let me be call-boy," he suggested. "Where do you want to get out?"
"At Craiford Junction. That's the station for Crailing, where I'm going. Do you know it at all? It's a tiny village in Devonshire; my guardian is the Rector there."
"Crailing?" An odd expression crossed his face and he hesitated a moment. At last, apparently coming to a decision of some kind, he said: "Then I must wake you up when I go, as I'm getting out before that."
"Can I trust you?" she asked sleepily.
"Surely."
She had curled herself up on the seat with her feet stretched out in front of her, one narrow foot resting lightly on the instep of the other, and she looked up at him speculatively from between the double fringe of her short black lashes.
"Yes, I believe I can," she acquiesced, with a little smile.
He tucked his travelling rug deftly round her, and, pulling on his overcoat, went hack to his former corner, where he picked up the neglected writing-pad and began scribbling in a rather desultory fashion.
Very soon her even breathing told him that she slept, and he laid aside the pad and sat quietly watching her. She looked very young and childish as she lay there, with the faint shadows of fatigue beneath her closed eyes—there was something appealing about her very helplessness. Presently the rug slipped a little, and he saw her hand groping vaguely for it. Quietly he tiptoed across the compartment and drew it more closely about her.
"Thank you—so much," she murmured drowsily, and the man looking down at her caught his breath sharply betwixt his teeth. Then, with an almost imperceptible shrug of his shoulders, he stepped back and resumed his seat.
The express sped on through the night, the little twin globes of light high up in the carriage ceiling jumping and flickering as it swung along the metals.
Down the track it flew like a living thing, a red glow marking its passage as it cleft the darkness, its freight of human souls contentedly sleeping, or smoking, or reading, as the fancy took them. And half a mile ahead on the permanent way, Death stood watching—watching and waiting where, by some hideous accident of fate, a faulty coupling-rod had snapped asunder in the process of shunting, leaving a solitary coal-truck to slide slowly back into the shadows of the night, unseen, the while its fellows were safely drawn on to a aiding.
CHAPTER III
AN ENCOUNTER WITH DEATH
One moment the even throbbing of the engine as the train slipped along through the silence of the country-side—the next, and the silence was split by a shattering roar and the shock of riven plates, the clash of iron driven against iron, and of solid woodwork grinding and grating as it splintered into wreckage.
Diana, suddenly—horribly—awake, found herself hurled from her seat. Absolute darkness lapped her round; it was as though a thick black curtain had descended, blotting out the whole world, while from behind it, immeasurably hideous in that utter night, uprose an inferno of cries and shrieks—the clamour of panic-stricken humanity.
Her hands, stretched stiffly out in front of her to ward off she knew not what impending horror hidden by the dark, came in contact with the framework of the window, and in an instant she was clinging to it, pressing up against it with her body, her fingers gripping and clutching at it as a rat, trapped in a well, claws madly at a projecting bit of stonework. It was at least something solid out of that awful void.
"What's happened? What's happened? What's happened?"
She was whispering the question over and over again in a queer, whimpering voice without the remotest idea of what she was saying. When a stinging pain shot through her arm, as a jagged point of broken glass bit into the flesh, and with a scream of utter, unreasoning terror she let go her hold.
The next moment she felt herself grasped and held by a pair of arms, and a voice spoke to her out of the darkness.
"Are you hurt? … My God, are you hurt?"
With a sob of relief she realised that it was the voice of her fellow-traveller. He was here, close to her, something alive and human in the midst of this nightmare of awful, unspeakable fear, and she clung to him, shuddering.
"Speak, can't you?" His utterance sounded hoarse and distorted. "You're hurt—?" And she felt his hands slide searchingly along her limbs, feeling and groping.
"No—no."
"Thank God!" He spoke under his breath. Then, giving her a shake:
"Come, pull yourself together. We must get out of this."
He fumbled in his pocket and she heard the rattle of a matchbox, and an instant later a flame spurted out in the gloom as he lit a bundle of matches together. In the brief illumination she could see the floor of the compartment steeply tilted up and at its further end what looked like a huge, black cavity. The whole side of the carriage had been wrenched away.
"Come on!" exclaimed the man, catching her by the hand and pulling her forward