As Olga shook hands with Alan, she looked up into his dark-blue eyes, with a glance such as he had never received from a woman before—a glance in which he seemed instinctively to read at once love and hate, frank admiration and equally undisguised defiance. Their eyes held each other for a moment of mutual fascination which neither could resist, and then the dark-fringed lids fell over hers, and a faint flush rose to her cheeks as she replied to his words of salutation—
“Surely the pleasure will rather be on our side, with travelling companions from the other world! For my own part, I seem to remind myself somewhat of one of the daughters of men whom the Sons of the Gods”—
She stopped short in the middle of her daring speech, and looked up at him again as much as to say—
“So much for the present. Let the Fates finish it!” and then, appearing to correct herself, she went on, with a half-saucy, half-deprecating smile on her dangerously-mobile lips—
“You know what I mean; not exactly that, but something of the sort.”
“More true, I fancy, of the daughter of men than of the supposed Sons of the Gods,” retorted Alan, with a laugh, half startled by her words, and wholly charmed by the indescribable fascination of the way in which she said them; “for the daughters of men were so fair that the Sons of the Gods lost heaven itself for their sakes.”
“Even so!” said Olga, looking him full in the eyes, and at that moment the signal sounded for them to take their places in the cars.
A couple of minutes after they had taken their seats, the train drew out of the station with an imperceptible, gliding motion, so smooth and frictionless that it seemed rather as though the people standing on the platform were sliding backwards than that the train was moving forward. The speed increased rapidly, but so evenly that, almost before they were well aware of it, the passengers were flying over the snow-covered landscape, under the bright, heatless sun and pale, steel-blue sky of a perfect winter’s morning, at a hundred miles an hour, the speed ever increasing as they sped onward.
The line followed the general direction of the present route to Dover, which was reached in about half an hour. Without pausing for a moment in its rapid flight, the express swept out from the land over the Channel Bridge, which spanned the Straits from Dover to Calais at a height of 200 feet above the water.
Travelling at a speed of three miles a minute, seven minutes sufficed for the express to leap, as it were, from land to land. As they swept along in mid-air over the waves, Olga pointed down to them and said to Alan, who was sitting in the armchair next her own—