“You are going to Boulogne?” asked the matron inspector.

Sara Lee did not like to lie.

“Wherever the boat takes me,” she said with smile.

The matron smiled too.

“I shouldn’t be nervous, miss,” she said.  “It’s a chance, of course, but they have not done much damage yet.”

It was after midnight then, and a cold fog made the station a gloomy thing of blurred yellow lights and raw chill.  A few people moved about, mostly officers in uniform.  Half a dozen men in civilian clothes eyed her as she passed through the gates; Scotland Yard, but she did not know.  And once she thought she saw Henri, but he walked away into the shadows and disappeared.  The train, looking as absurdly small and light as all English trains do, was waiting out in the shed.  There were no porters, and Sara Lee carried her own bag.

She felt quite sure she had been mistaken about Henri, for of course he would have come and carried it for her.

The train was cold and quiet.  When it finally moved out it was under way before she knew that it was going.  And then suddenly Sara Lee’s heart began to pound hard.

It was a very cold and shivering Sara Lee who curled up, alone in her compartment, and stared hard at Harvey’s ring to keep her courage up.  But a curious thing had happened.  Harvey gave her no moral support.  He brought her only disapproval.  She found herself remembering none of the loving things he had said to her, but only the bitter ones.

Perhaps it was the best thing for her, after all.  For a sort of dogged determination to go through with it all, at any cost, braced her to her final effort.

So far it had all been busy enough, but not comfortable.  She was cold, and she had eaten almost nothing all day.  As the hours went on and the train slid through the darkness she realized that she was rather faint.  The steam pipes, only warm at the start, were entirely cold by one o’clock, and by two Sara Lee was sitting on her feet, with a heavy coat wrapped about her knees.

The train moved quietly, as do all English trains, with no jars and little sound.  There were few lights outside, for the towns of Eastern England were darkened, like London, against air attacks.  So when she looked at the window she saw only her own reflection, white and wide-eyed, above Aunt Harriet’s fur neckpiece.

In the next compartment an officer was snoring, but she did not close her eyes.  Perhaps, for that last hour, some of the glow that had brought her so far failed her.  She was not able to think beyond Folkestone, save occasionally, and that with a feeling that it should not be made so difficult to do a kind and helpful thing.

At a quarter before three the train eased down.  In the same proportion Sara Lee’s pulse went up.  A long period of crawling along, a stop or two, but no resultant opening of the doors; and at last, in a cold rain and a howling wind from the channel, the little seaport city.