"You will pardon my mentioning it, my lord," he said, "but the young lady's maid has been travelling in my carriage, and a nice fidget she's been in all the way. She's been muttering to herself in French, and she seems terribly frightened about something or other. The moment the train stopped here, she rushed off to the telegraph office."
"She seems a little excitable," Wolfenden remarked. "All right, Selby, you'd better hurry up and get what you want to eat."
"Certainly, my lord; and perhaps your lordship knows that there is a flower-stall in the corner there."
Wolfenden nodded and hurried off. He returned to the carriage just as the train was moving off, with a handful of fresh, wet violets, whose perfume seemed instantly to fill the compartment. The girl held out her hands with a little exclamation of pleasure.
"What a delightful travelling companion you are," she declared. "I think these English violets are the sweetest flowers in the world."
She held them up to her lips. Wolfenden was looking at a paper bag in her lap.
"Buns!" she answered. "You must not think that because I am a girl I am never hungry. It is two o'clock, and I am positively famished. I sent my maid for them."
He smiled, and sweeping away the bundles of rugs and coats, produced the luncheon basket which he had secured at King's Cross, and opening it, spread out the contents.
"For two!" she exclaimed, "and what a delightful looking salad! Where on earth did that come from?"
"Oh, I am no magician," he exclaimed. "I ordered the basket at King's Cross, after I had seen you. Let me spread the cloth here. My dressing-case will make a capital table!"
They picnicked together gaily. It seemed to Wolfenden that chicken and tongue had never tasted so well before, or claret, at three shillings the bottle, so full and delicious. They cleared everything up, and then sat and talked over the cigarette which she had insisted upon. But although he tried more than once, he could not lead the conversation into any serious channel--she would not talk of her past, she distinctly avoided the future. Once, when he had made a deliberate effort to gain some knowledge as to her earlier surroundings, she reproved him with a silence so marked that he hastened to talk of something else.