He looked round the dark little room with bewildered eyes; then he fumbled with a button, and all was flooded with light.

He was lying in a little spring-bed, set within two padded sides, like a berth in a steamship.  And beside him was the closed bureau which he perceived to be washing arrangements in disguise; overhead protruded a broad shelf; on the wall, above a little couch, hung silk curtains over a window; and, as they swayed slightly with some movement he caught sight of glass beyond.  On the door, at the foot of his bed, hung his cassock, and the purple cincture that lay across it recalled him to at least a part of the facts.  The cabin was upholstered and painted in clean white, and an electric globe emerged from the ceiling.

He was next conscious of cold, and instinctively leaned forward to draw the quilt farther over his knees.  Then, with a flash, he remembered, and, in spite of the cold, was out of bed in a moment, kneeling on the couch and peering out through the curtains.

At first he could see nothing at all.  There was but an unfathomable gulf beyond the glass.  He stood up on the couch, and drawing the curtains behind his head to shut out the light, he once more stared out.  Then he began to see.

At first he could see nothing at all.  There was but an unfathomable gulf beyond the glass.  He stood up on the couch, and drawing the curtains behind his head to shut out the light, he once more stared out.  Then he began to see.

Immediately opposite him glimmered a huge white outline—­in the incalculable night it might be a hundred yards or a mile away.  It was of irregular outline, for the star-strewn sky showed in patches and rifts above it.  And this white mass curved away beneath, under the ship in which he travelled, till it met, at a point which he could but just discern, a blackness that rose to meet it.

Then, as his eyes grew accustomed to the dark, he began to see that the huge whiteness was flitting past, steadily and leisurely, from right to left; that it was streaked with shadows or clefts; and that following it, as in a sliding procession, came another, like it, yet (it seemed) more distant.

All this time, too, the silence was profound.  There was but a soft humming note somewhere in the air, and the faintest sense of vibration in the metal-work on which his hands were pressed.  Once too he heard a footstep pass softly and rhythmically overhead, as if some watcher moved up and down the length of the upper deck.

The man dropped the curtains and sat back on his heels, trying to force into his imagination the facts that he now perceived and remembered.

They had left St. Germains last night, after dining at Versailles.  They were now crossing the Alps.  They would be in Rome for Mass and breakfast. . . .  They were traversing at this moment, no doubt, only a thousand feet high, one of those passes up which (he thought he remembered from history) the old railway-trains had been accustomed to climb, yard by yard and spiral by spiral, a hundred years before . . .