On a cold morning in July, 1913, Lettice climbed down from a Belgian third-class carriage, dragging her luggage behind her, and found herself at Graide station, province of Luxemburg. Lettice was an expert in the art of traveling cheaply. She had left Victoria the previous afternoon, in a slow train, because the boat expresses don't take third-class passengers. After a wait at Dover, she had crossed by night in the fetid atmosphere of the second-class ladies' cabin of the old Rapide, and had been excessively ill. Continuing her journey at 4 A.M., she had traveled to Brussels in a smoking compartment with all the windows shut. Namur, Dinant, Houyet—she lost count of her changes after that. Sometimes she faced the engine; more often she had to ride back; once a Belgian père de famille marched across the width of the carriage and ruthlessly pulled up the window, her window, under her very nose. Always somebody was smoking, to the usual accompaniments, under the notice "Niet Rooken"; and always, at every change, she had to drag her heavy basket down steps and across lines of rail and heave it up to racks far above her aching head. We buy our pleasures dear when we are young. But this was the end. At Graide she was to meet the diligence which should land her at the doors of the Hôtel Bellevue.
Of course there was no porter. In those days there never were any porters at a Belgian country station. If you didn't expédier your baggage (as every self-respecting traveler should), you had to carry it yourself. Lettice's baggage was what is known as a pilgrim basket, gone at the corners, with a double strap which had slipped into a string round its middle, leaving the ends bulging. Bending to it like a patient donkey, she trailed across the loose gray gravel to the exit, and at last was outside in the road. The Café de la Gare confronted her, a yellow house with red facings and a blue slate roof. "Bureau de la diligence" appeared on its sign, but the customary shabby, dirty, stuffy, rickety ruin of a two-horse shandrydan was nowhere to be seen.
"Pour Rochehaut, madame?"
A smart commissionaire had seized her basket. Round his cap in gilt lettering ran the words, "Hôtel Bellevue." Lettice nodded distrustfully, and in a trice was whisked round the corner, still clinging to her strap. Behold the diligence of the Hôtel Bellevue—a brand-new motor char-à-banc, glistening in tan-colored varnish! The commissionaire threw open the door with a flourish worthy of the boulevards, and Lettice subsided in a corner as if her patient knees had at last given way.
In the fresh air she presently revived enough to take notice of her fellow-travelers. There were two, both women, the elder obviously a maid. Lettice had seen them before, at Dinant, descending from a voiture-salon with a porter in attendance, and had marked them with a malevolent eye, having tried in vain to secure that porter herself. But even without that memory she would have noticed the younger of the two.
She was a tall slip of a girl, scarcely out of her teens, but not dressed like an ingénue. Her French hat, her furs, her gloves, the exquisite cloth of her suit, all her traveling appointments might have belonged to a married woman of thirty. Yet she was not married, for there was no wedding ring among the diamonds on her finger, and Lettice, whose eyes were as good as opera-glasses, could read the label on the gold-mounted dressing-case in the rack above her head—Miss D. M. O'Connor, Hôtel Bellevue. She looked fragile, as if recovering from an illness, and her figure was still slender and undeveloped; but she had masses of exquisitely glossy dark hair, and great dark eyes, full of fire and gloom. Young though she was, she knew how to get herself obeyed. When she scowled (and she could scowl, with those black brows), even a Belgian porter came to attention. Lettice was wondering what it was that had set her at odds with the world, and written such bitterness on the small, brooding face, when the dark eyes looked up and met hers with a smile, sudden and child-like, which had just the effect of a sunburst over a gloomy landscape.
But before she could speak the unsociable Lettice hurriedly averted her eyes and blotted herself in her corner. She make talk with a stranger for an hour, and begin an acquaintance which would have to be continued, with smiles and remarks about the weather, every time they chanced to meet in the hotel? No, thank you! The most interesting character study was not worth that. Lettice would have walked a couple of miles any day to avoid a chance acquaintance.
Miss O'Connor stared, half incredulous; then the clouds came down again with a vengeance, and she turned her back on the ungrateful Lettice and looked out of the window. They were passing down a straight road between long strips of arable land, wheat, potatoes, cabbages, beets, fenceless and flat as a table; and with the road went an avenue of trees, each lopped to a mop-head atop of its naked stem, crawling away like a green caterpillar to the limit of sight. In the distance a tiny white church raised a gray conical spire like an extinguisher; a group of white and gray dolls'-houses clustered below, drowsily basking, blue haze and brown dust, under the hazy sky.
"Louisa! What time do we get to Rochehaut?"
"Half-past twelve the book said, Miss Dot."