I was alone with the adventuress.  I had no doubt but that she had chosen my carriage with intent.  I placed my dispatch-box on the rack above my head, and opened out a newspaper, which I had no intention of reading.  She, for her part, arranged her travelling light and took out a novel.  She did not apparently even glance in my direction, and seemed to become immersed at once in her reading.  So we travelled for half an hour or so.

At the end of that time I was suddenly conscious that she had laid down her book, and was regarding me through partially-closed eyes.  I too laid down my paper.  Our eyes met, and she smiled.

“Forgive me,” she said, “but did I not see you one day last week upon the sands at Braster with Lady Angela Harberly?”

“I believe so,” I answered.  “You were riding, I think, with her brother.”

“How fortunate that I should find myself travelling with a neighbour!” she murmured.  “I rather dreaded this night journey.  I just missed the six o’clock, and I have been at the station ever since.”

I understood at once one of the charms of this woman.  Her voice was deliciously soft and musical.  The words seemed to leave her lips slowly, almost lingeringly, and she spoke with the precision and slight accent of a well-educated foreigner.  Her eyes seemed to be wandering all over me and my possessions, yet her interest, if it amounted to that, never even suggested curiosity or inquisitiveness.

“It is scarcely a pleasant journey at this time of night,” I remarked.

“Indeed, no,” she assented.  “I wonder if you know my name?  I am Mrs. Smith-Lessing, of Braster Grange.  And you?”

“My name is Guy Ducaine,” I told her.  “I live at a small cottage called the ‘Brand.’”

“That charming little place you can just see from the sands?” she exclaimed.  “I thought the Duke’s head-keeper lived there.”

“It was a keeper’s lodge before the Duke was kind enough to let it to me,” I told her.

She nodded.

“It is a very delightful abode,” she murmured.

She picked up her book, and after turning over the pages aimlessly for a few minutes, she recommenced to read.  I followed her example; but when a little later on I glanced across in her direction, I found that her eyes were fixed upon me, and that her novel lay in her lap.

“My book is so stupid,” she said apologetically.  “I find, Mr. Ducaine,” she added with sudden earnestness, “the elements of a much stranger story closer at hand.”

“That,” I remarked, laying down my own book, and looking steadily across at her, “sounds enigmatic.”

“I think,” she said, “that I am very foolish to talk to you at all about it.  If you know who I am, you are probably armed against me at all points.  You will weigh and measure my words, you will say to yourself, ‘Lies, lies, lies!’ You will not believe in me or anything I say.  And, again, if you do not know, the story is too painful a one for me to tell.”