“Can I trust you?” she asked sleepily.

“Surely.”

She had curled herself up on the seat with her feet stretched out in front of her, one narrow foot resting lightly on the instep of the other, and she looked up at him speculatively from between the double fringe of her short black lashes.

“Yes, I believe I can,” she acquiesced, with a little smile.

He tucked his travelling rug deftly round her, and, pulling on his overcoat, went hack to his former corner, where he picked up the neglected writing-pad and began scribbling in a rather desultory fashion.

Very soon her even breathing told him that she slept, and he laid aside the pad and sat quietly watching her.  She looked very young and childish as she lay there, with the faint shadows of fatigue beneath her closed eyes—­there was something appealing about her very helplessness.  Presently the rug slipped a little, and he saw her hand groping vaguely for it.  Quietly he tiptoed across the compartment and drew it more closely about her.

“Thank you—­so much,” she murmured drowsily, and the man looking down at her caught his breath sharply betwixt his teeth.  Then, with an almost imperceptible shrug of his shoulders, he stepped back and resumed his seat.

The express sped on through the night, the little twin globes of light high up in the carriage ceiling jumping and flickering as it swung along the metals.

Down the track it flew like a living thing, a red glow marking its passage as it cleft the darkness, its freight of human souls contentedly sleeping, or smoking, or reading, as the fancy took them.  And half a mile ahead on the permanent way, Death stood watching—­watching and waiting where, by some hideous accident of fate, a faulty coupling-rod had snapped asunder in the process of shunting, leaving a solitary coal-truck to slide slowly back into the shadows of the night, unseen, the while its fellows were safely drawn on to a aiding.

CHAPTER III

AN ENCOUNTER WITH DEATH

One moment the even throbbing of the engine as the train slipped along through the silence of the country-side—­the next, and the silence was split by a shattering roar and the shock of riven plates, the clash of iron driven against iron, and of solid woodwork grinding and grating as it splintered into wreckage.

Diana, suddenly—­horribly—­awake, found herself hurled from her seat.  Absolute darkness lapped her round; it was as though a thick black curtain had descended, blotting out the whole world, while from behind it, immeasurably hideous in that utter night, uprose an inferno of cries and shrieks—­the clamour of panic-stricken humanity.

Her hands, stretched stiffly out in front of her to ward off she knew not what impending horror hidden by the dark, came in contact with the framework of the window, and in an instant she was clinging to it, pressing up against it with her body, her fingers gripping and clutching at it as a rat, trapped in a well, claws madly at a projecting bit of stonework.  It was at least something solid out of that awful void.