It was the place to which she wanted to go. She nodded to the man, who opened his door and let her in.
She was at the station at a quarter to four, and the train for Newhaven did not leave till seven—a long dismal stretch of empty time to be lived through. But she could not improve her situation by going anywhere else. The station, with its dingy waiting-rooms and garish refreshment-room, was as good an hotel for her as any other. She was faint for want of food, having taken nothing since her apology for breakfast at seven o'clock.
'Can one get a cup of tea here?' she asked of the dry-as-dust matron in charge of the waiting-room; whereupon the matron good-naturedly offered to fetch her some tea.
'If you would be so kind,' she faltered, too exhausted to speak above a whisper; 'I don't like going into that crowded refreshment-room.'
'No, to be sure—not much used to travelling alone, I daresay. You will be better when you've had a cup of tea.'
The tea, with a roll and butter, revived exhausted nature. Ida paid for this temperate refreshment, went to the booking-office, made some inquiries about her ticket, and bought herself a book at the stall, wherewith to beguile the time and to distract her mind from brooding on its own miseries.
She felt it was a frightful extravagance as she paid away two of Miss Cobb's shillings for Bulwer's 'Caxtons;' but she felt also that to live through those three tedious hours without such aid would be a step on the road to a lunatic asylum.
Armed with her book, she went back to the waiting-room, settled herself in a corner of the sofa, and remained there absorbed, immovable; while travellers came and went, all alike fussy, flurried, and full of their own concerns—not one of them stopping to notice the pale, tired-looking girl reading in the remotest corner of the spacious room.
A somewhat stormy passage brought the boat which carried Ida and her fortunes to straggling, stony, smelly Dieppe, now abandoned to its native population, and deprived of that flavour of fashion which pervades its beach in the brighter months of August and September. The town looked gray, cold, and forbidding in the bleak October morning, when Ida found herself alone amidst its stoniness, the native population only just beginning to bestir itself in the street above the quay, and making believe, by an inordinate splashing and a frantic vehemence in the use of birch-brooms, to be the cleanest population under the sun; an assertion of superiority somewhat belied by an all-pervading odour of decomposed vegetable matter, a small heap of which refuse, including egg-shells and fishy offal—which the town in the matutinal cleansing process offered up to the sun-god as incense upon an altar—lay before every door, to be collected by the local scavenger at his leisure, or to be blown about and disseminated by the winds of heaven.
Alone upon the stony quay, in the freshness and chilliness of early morning, Ida took temporary refuge in the humblest café she could find, where a feeble old woman was feebly brooming the floor, and where there was no appearance of any masculine element. Here she expended another of Miss Cobb's shillings upon a cup of coffee and a roll. She had spent five and twenty shillings for her second-class ticket. The debt to Miss Cobb now amounted to a sovereign and a half; and Ida Palliser thought of it with an aching sense of her own helplessness to refund so large a sum. Yesterday morning, believing herself about to become the wife of a rich man, she had thought what fun it would be to send 'Cobby' a five-pound note in the prettiest of ivory purses from one of those shops in the street yonder.