“You are not much tired, then, by your dissipation of last night?” said Mrs. Kavanagh to her at the station, as the slender, fair-haired, grave lady looked admiringly at the girl’s fresh color and bright gray-blue eyes.  “It makes one envy you to see you looking so strong and in such good spirits.”

“How happy you must be always!” said Mrs. Lorraine; and the younger lady had the same sweet, low and kindly voice as her mother.

“I am very well, thank you,” said Sheila, blushing somewhat and not lifting her eyes, while Lavender was impatient that she had not answered with a laugh and some light retort, such as would have occurred to almost any woman in the circumstances.

On the journey down, Lavender and Mrs. Lorraine, seated opposite each other in two corner seats, kept up a continual cross-fire of small pleasantries, in which the young American lady had distinctly the best of it, chiefly by reason of her perfect manner.  The keenest thing she said was said with a look of great innocence and candor in the large gray eyes; and then directly afterward she would say something very nice and pleasant in precisely the same voice, as if she could not understand that there was any effort on the part of either to assume an advantage.  The mother sometimes turned and listened to this aimless talk with an amused gravity, as of a cat watching the gambols of a kitten, but generally she devoted herself to Sheila, who sat opposite her.  She did not talk much, and Sheila was glad of that, but the girl felt that she was being observed with some little curiosity.  She wished that Mrs. Kavanagh would turn those observant gray eyes of hers away in some other direction.  Now and again Sheila would point out what she considered strange or striking in the country outside, and for a moment the elderly lady would look out.  But directly afterward the gray eyes would come back to Sheila, and the girl knew they were upon her.  At last she so persistently stared out of the window that she fell to dreaming, and all the trees and the meadows and the farm-houses and the distant heights and hollows went past her as though they were in a sort of mist, while she replied to Mrs. Kavanagh’s chance remarks in a mechanical fashion, and could only hear as a monotonous murmur the talk of the two people at the other side of the carriage.  How much of the journey did she remember?  She was greatly struck by the amount of open land in the neighborhood of London—­the commons between Wandsworth and Streatham, and so forth—­and she was pleased with the appearance of the country about Red Hill.  For the rest, a succession of fair green pictures passed by her, all bathed in a calm, half-misty summer sunlight:  then they pierced the chalk-hills (which Sheila, at first sight, fancied were of granite) and rumbled through the tunnels.  Finally, with just a glimpse of a great mass of gray houses filling a vast hollow and stretching up the bare green downs beyond, they found themselves in Brighton.