not to be mistaken—­also his cadaverous and sickly look, and his shabby clothes.  The ticket-collector saw that the man was holding the dark-eyed, “furrin-looking” child by the hand, which the woman he met had brought down with her.  “Furriners,” he supposed, all of them; part of that stream of fugitives from air raids that had been flowing out of London during the preceding winter, and was now flowing out again, as the next winter approached, though in less volume.  Every house and lodging in Millsborough was full, prices had gone up badly, and life in Millsborough was becoming extremely uncomfortable for its normal inhabitants—­“all along o’ these panicky aliens!” thought the ticket-collector, resentfully, as he looked at the tall man.

The tall man, however, was behaving as though the market-place belonged to him, talking to his neighbours, who mostly looked at him askance, and every now and then breaking into a contemptuous laugh, provoked apparently by the eloquence of the young woman in the wagon.  Meanwhile the little girl whose hand he held was trying to pull him into a better place for seeing the rest of the procession.  For from the place where they stood on the outskirts of the crowd, the foremost wagon with its nodding wheat and sheaves, its speaker, its old women, and its bodyguard of girls entirely hid the cart behind it.

“Dis way, pappa, dis way,” said the child, dragging him.  He let her draw him, and suddenly from behind the speaker’s cart there emerged the second wagon with its white horses; Rachel Henderson, the observed of all beholders, standing flushed and smiling, with the reins in her hands, the vicar just behind her, and Lady Alicia’s lace parasol.

“My God!” said the man.

His sudden start, and clutch at the child’s hand made the child cry out.  He checked her with a savage word, and while she whimpered unheeded, he stood motionless, sheltering himself behind a girl with a large hat who stood in front of him, his eyes fixed on the Great End wagon.  A ghastly white had replaced the patchy red on his cheeks, and had any careful observer chanced to notice him at the moment, he or she would have been struck by the expression of his face—­as of some evil, startled beast aware of its enemy, and making ready to spring.

But the expression passed.  With a long breath, Roger Delane pulled himself together.

“Hold your noise, Nina,” he said roughly to the child.  “If you’ll be a good girl, I’ll put you on my shoulder.”

The child stopped crying at once, and Delane, raising her on to his shoulder, pulling his own soft hat over his eyes and placing the child so that her dress concealed his own features.  Then he resumed an excited scrutiny of the Great End wagon.  At the same moment he saw a man in uniform making his way through the crowd towards Miss Henderson who was waving to him.  An officer—­an American officer.  Delane recognized at once the high collar and the leathern peak to the cap.