CHAPTER XIV.
"If he would despise me I would forgive him; for if he love me to madness I shall never requite him."
"Good-bye!" says Paul Vasher, as he stands on the step of the railway carriage with my hand in his. "I am coming home in a day or two, and I shall then keep you to your promise."
I do not answer or look at him, although I feel his eyes searching my face. The guard waves his flag; Alice kisses her hand from the distant carriage—"Good-bye! good-bye!"—a swift glance at Paul's dark face, a wave of the hand to Alice, and I am off, either to render up my valueless body at Silverbridge Station at 5.25, or make an unsightly corpse on the top of the engine-boiler, or thereabouts.
There was a horrible railway accident a little while ago, and following that another and another. They have come hurrying after each other so fast that men going a journey wear sober faces, and enter a railway carriage with an ugly presentiment of its being a probable tomb, and are haunted with dread visions of a fast train dashing up behind, or a slow one right in the path in front, and cannot settle to their newspapers and slumbers as usual. What a pity it is bridges are not built higher, and people cannot travel outside trains as they do on coaches; one would at least be able to keep a look-out and see if Nemesis were overtaking us, and have a chance for our lives, instead of sitting stived up, blind as moles, helpless as infants, awaiting the crash that shoots us in one awful moment into eternity. If I come to grief to-day it will be alone, for I have a compartment all to myself, and can walk about, yawn, stretch, lounge, even laugh or cry, if it so pleases me.
Can it be only a month ago that I sped past those prim hedgerows and fields, with the ruminating cows and insensate children,
