A lady stood behind the gentleman.  They were both on the platform at the front of a passenger car.

“It’s for a child, you know,” explained the gentleman.

Trenholme remembered his untouched tea, and confessed to the possession of a little milk.

“Oh, hasten, hasten!” cried the lady, “for the guard says the train will move on in a moment.”

As Trenholme knew that the little French conductor thus grandly quoted did not know when the train would start, and as in his experience the train, whatever else it did, never hastened, he did not move with the sudden agility that was desired.  Before he turned he heard a loud-whispered aside from the lady:  “Tell him we’ll pay him double—­treble, for it; I have heard they are avaricious.”

When Trenholme had started the train he jumped upon it with the milk.  He found himself in a long car.  The double seats on either side were filled with sleepy people.  There was a passage down the middle, and the lamps above shone dimly through dirty glasses.  Trenholme could not immediately see any one like the man who had spoken to him outside, but he did spy out a baby, and, jug in hand, he went and stood a moment near it.

The lady who held the baby sat upright, with her head leaning against the side of the car.  She was dozing, and the baby was also asleep.  It was a rosy, healthy child, about a year old.  The lady’s handsome face suggested she was about seven-and-twenty.  Among all the shawl-wrapped heaps of restless humanity around them, this pair looked very lovely together.  The dusty lamplight fell upon them.  They seemed to Trenholme like a beautiful picture of mother and child, such as one sometimes comes upon among the evil surroundings of old frames and hideous prints.

Said Trenholme aloud:  “I don’t know who asked me for the milk.”

The lady stirred and looked at him indifferently.  She seemed very beautiful.  Men see with different eyes in these matters, but in Trenholme’s eyes this lady was faultless, and her face and air touched some answering mood of reverence in his heart.  It rarely happens, however, that we can linger gazing at the faces which possess for us the most beauty.  The train was getting up speed, and Trenholme, just then catching sight of the couple who had asked for the milk, had no choice but to pass down the car and pour it into the jar they held.

The gentleman put his hand in his pocket.  “Oh no,” said Trenholme, and went out.  But the more lively lady reopened the door behind him, and threw a coin on the ground as he was descending.

By the sound it had made Trenholme found it, and saw by the light of the passing car that it was an English shilling.  When the train was gone he stood a minute where it had carried him, some hundred feet from the station, and watched it going on into the darkness.

Afterwards, when his companions had composed themselves to sleep, and he lay sleepless, listening to all that could be heard in the silent night, curiously enough it was not upon the exciting circumstances of the early evening that he mused chiefly, but upon the people he had seen in the night train.