yielding to which even those least capable of appreciating her confessed that, whatever her conduct might be, she herself was irresistibly lovable.  A kind of dream-like haze seemed to envelop us as I introduced myself, as she smiled upon me, as she resigned the child to its mother and bid them tenderly farewell; but the clear air of the real became distinct again when there stood suddenly before us a fat elderly female, whose countenance was flushed with mingled anxiety and displeasure.

“Law bless me, mem!” said the newcomer, “I could not think wherever you could be.  I have been looking up and down for you, all through the first-class carriages.”

“I am so sorry, Parkins,” said Mrs. de Noel penitently; “I ought to have let you know that I changed my carriage at Carchester.  I wanted to nurse a baby whose mother was looking ill and tired.  I saw them on the platform, and then they got into a third-class carriage, so I thought the best way would be to get in with them.”

“And where, if you please, mem,” inquired Parkins, in an icy tone and with a face stiffened by repressed displeasure—­“where do you think you have left your dressing-bag and humbrella?”

Mrs. de Noel fixed her sweet eyes upon the speaker, as if striving to recollect the answer to this question and then replied—­

“She told me she lived quite near the station.  I wish I had asked her how far.  She is much too weak to walk any distance.  I might have found a fly for her, might I not?”

Upon which Parkins gave a snort of irrepressible exasperation, and, evidently renouncing her mistress as beyond hope, forthwith departed in search of the missing property.  I accompanied her, and, with the aid of the guard, we speedily found and secured both bag and umbrella, and, as the train steamed off, returned with these treasures to Mrs. de Noel, still on the same spot and in the same attitude as we had left her, and all that she said was—­

“It was so stupid, so forgetful, so just like me not to have asked her more about it.  She had been ill; the journey itself was more than she could stand; and then to have to carry the baby!  She said it was not far, but perhaps she only said that to please me.  Poor people are so afraid of distressing one; they often make themselves out better off than they really are, don’t they?”

I was embarrassed by this question, to which my own experience did not authorise me to answer yes; but I evaded the difficulty by consulting a porter, who fortunately knew the woman, and was able to assure us that her cottage was barely a stone’s throw from the station.  When I had conveyed to Mrs. de Noel this information, which she received with an eager gratitude that the recovery of her bag and umbrella had failed to rouse, we left the station to go to the carriage, and then it was that, pausing suddenly, she cried out in dismay—­

“Ah, you are hurt! you—­”

She stopped abruptly; she had divined the truth, and her eyes grew softer with such tender pity as not yet had shone for me—­motherless, sisterless—­on any woman’s face.  As we drove home that evening she heard the story that never had been told before.