‘We are all alone!’ they cried to each other joyously.

But at the same instant, a man of about fifty, all dressed in black, with a grave preoccupied expression, entered the carriage and settled himself in a corner, the locomotive whistled, and the train began to move. The young people, moving away as far as they could get from their unwelcome neighbour, began to speak to one another in a low voice, and in English, by way of excess of precaution.

‘Sir,’ said the other traveller, in the same language and with a much purer British accent, ‘if you have secrets to tell, you will do well not to tell them in English before me. I am an Englishman. I am dreadfully sorry to embarrass you, but in the other compartment there was a man alone, and I make it my principle never to travel with a man alone—that man there had the face of a Judas. And that might have tempted him.’

He pointed to his travelling bag, which he had thrown down before him on a cushion.

‘Anyhow, if I’m not asleep I’ll be reading.’

In fact, he tried loyally to sleep. He opened his bag, took out of it a comfortable cap, put it on his head, and kept his eyes closed for several minutes; then he opened them again with a gesture of impatience, looked in his bag for his glasses, then a Greek book; finally he began to read with great attention. To get at the book in his bag he had to disarrange a lot of things tossed in haphazard. Among others, he drew from the depths of the bag a fairly fat bundle of English banknotes, put them on the seat opposite him, and before replacing them in his bag he showed them to the young man, asking him if he would be able to change banknotes at N—.

‘Probably. It’s on the road to England.’

N— was the place to which the two young people were going. There is in N— a tidy enough little hotel where hardly anybody sleeps except on a Saturday night. The rooms are said to be good. The proprietor and his staff are not far enough away from Paris to have this provincial vice. The young man, whom I have already called Leo, had been to see this hotel some time before, without his blue spectacles, and in consequence of the report he had brought of it, his friend had seemed smitten with the desire to visit it.

In any case she was on that day in such a state of mind that the walls of a prison would have seemed to her full of charm, if she could have been shut up there with Leo.

However, the train still went on; the Englishman read his Greek without turning his head towards his companions, who talked so low that only lovers could have heard each other. Maybe I shall not surprise my readers when I tell them that they were lovers in all the senses of the word, and what is deplorable about it is, that they were not married, and that there were reasons which prevented them from becoming so.

The train reached N—. The Englishman got down first. While Leo helped his lady to get out of the coach without showing her legs, a man leaped on to the platform from the neighbouring compartment. He was pale, yellowish even, his eyes hollow and bloodshot, his beard ill-kempt, a sign by which great criminals are often recognized. His suit was clean, but worn threadbare. His frock-coat, formerly black, now grey at the back and the elbows, was buttoned up to his chin, probably to hide a worn-out waistcoat. He went up to the Englishmen, and in a very humble tone:

‘Uncle!’ he said in English.

‘Leave me alone, you wretch,’ cried the Englishman, in the same language, and his grey eyes lit up with a flash of anger.