As the train moved out of the station he took her hand, and said that he hoped they would be very happy together.  She looked at him, and in her eyes there was a little questioning, almost cynical look, which perplexed him.  The part he had to play was a difficult one, and on board the boat, in the pauses of their conversation, he had felt that his future influence over Evelyn depended upon his conduct during the forthcoming week.  This foresight had its origin in his temperament.  It was his temperament to suggest and to lead, and as he talked to her of Madame Savelli, the great singing mistress, and Lady Duckle, a lady whom he hoped to induce to come to Paris to chaperon her, he saw the hotel sitting-room at the moment when the waiter, having brought in the coffee, and delayed his departure as long as he possibly could, would finally close the door.  Nervousness dilated her eyes, and his thoughts were often far from his words.  He often had to catch his breath, and he quailed before the dread interrogation which often looked out of her eyes.  They had passed Boulogne, and through the dawn, vague as an opal, appeared a low range of hills, and as these receded, the landscape flattened out into a bleak, morose plain.

What lives were lived yonder in that low grange, crouching under the five melancholy poplars?  An hour later father and son would go forth in that treacherous quaking boat, lying amid the sedge, and cast their net into one of those black pools.  But these pictures of primeval simplicities which the landscape evoked were not in accord with a journey toward love and pleasure.  Evelyn and Owen did not dare to contrast their lives with those of the Picardy peasants, and that they should see not roses and sunshine, but a broken and abandoned boat amid the sedge, and mournful hills faintly outlined against the heavy, lowering sky seemed to them significant.  They watched the filmy, diffused, opal light of the dawn, and they were filled with nervous expectation.  The man who appeared at the end of the plain in his primitive guise of a shepherd driving his flock towards the hard thin grass of the uplands seemed menacing and hostile.  His tall felt hat seemed like a helmet in the dusk, his crook like a lance, and Owen understood that the dawn was the end of the truce, that the battle with Nature was about to begin again.  At that moment she was thinking that if she had done wrong in leaving home, the sin was worth all the scruples she might endure, and she rejoiced that she endured none.  He folded her in his rug.  The train seemed to stop, and the names of the stations sounded dim in her ears.  Her perceptions rose and sank, and, as they sank, the villa engarlanded, of which Owen had spoken, seemed there.  Its gates, though unbarred, were impassable.  She thought she was shaking them, but when she opened her eyes it was Owen telling her that they had passed the fortifications, that they were in Paris.