There is a tide - J. C. Snaith

D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
NEW YORK :: :: MCMXXIV

THERE IS A TIDE

I

SO this was England.

A slight, pretty girl, in a corner seat of the boat express, was looking out of the window. To her everything was new and odd and a face curiously expressive was quick to register its emotions.

All was on a scale so much less than the land from which she had come. The neatly parcelled acres somehow reminded her of Noah’s ark. Farmsteads trim and tiny; amusing hedgerows; the cattle and horses in the fields; the comic little villages, each with its moss-grown church tower peering through the damp mist, were so expected and yet so unnatural to the eye of a stranger that it was rather like a scene in a play.

The girl was in the compartment alone. By her side was a “grip,” cheap looking, battered, with an air of travel; in the rack, above her head, was its fellow with a mackintosh and an umbrella. Like their owner, these articles had a subtle air of the second rate. Yet the girl herself, had she known how to wear her clothes, which were not bad of their kind, had certain points that seemed to promise a way out.