The train rushed on through the woods of Fontainebleau and across wide plains intersected by poplar-fringed canals. As the evening mists rose lights began to twinkle in cottage windows, and in the villages the church bells were ringing the prayer to the Virgin. Olive had laid aside her book some time since, and now, wearying of the grey twilit world, she fell asleep.
Jean Avenel, too, had watched the waning of the day from his place in a smoking first for a while, before he got up and began to prowl restlessly about the corridors. “She will be so tired if she does not eat,” he said to himself. “They ought not to let a child like that travel alone. I wonder—” He walked down the corridor again, but this time he looked into each compartment. He saw three Englishmen and an American playing whist, Germans eating, and French people sleeping, and at last he came upon his rose. A small man, mean-featured and scrubby-haired, was seated opposite to her, and his shining eyes were fixed upon her face. She had taken off her hat and was holding it on her lap, and Jean saw that she was clutching at it nervously, and that she was pale. He understood that it was probably her first experience of the Italian stare, deliberate, merciless, and indefinitely prolonged. She flushed as he came forward, and her eyes were eloquent as they met his. He sat down beside her.
“Please forgive me,” he said quietly, “but I can see this man is annoying you. Shall I glare him out of the place? I can.”
“Oh, please do,” she answered. “He has frightened me so. He was talking before you came.”
The culprit already looked disconcerted and rather foolish, and now, as Jean leant forward and seemed about to speak to him, he began to be frightened. He fidgeted, thrusting his hands in his pockets, looking out of the window, humming a tune. His ears grew red. He tried to meet the other man’s level gaze and failed. He got up rather hurriedly. The brown eyes watched him slinking out before they allowed themselves a second sight of the rose.
“Thank you so much,” said Olive. “I feel as if you had killed a spider for me, or an earwig. He was more like an earwig. He must have come in here while I was asleep.”
“A deported waiter going back to his native Naples, I imagine,” Jean said. “They ought not to have let you travel alone.”
She smiled. “I am a law unto myself.”
“That is a pity. Will you think me very impertinent if I confess that I have been watching over you—at a respectful distance—ever since we left Victoria? I do not approve of children wandering—”
She tilted her pretty chin at him. “Children! So you have made yourself into a sort of G.F.S. for me?”