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." 

"Which means half-past one, I suppose," said Dorothea O'Connor in her caustic young voice. They were speaking in undertones, but 

 Prev. P 31/255 next