I heard him demand a ticket for Penryn, and, after waiting until he had left the booking office, took one myself for the same station.  I watched him as he chose his compartment, and then entered the next.  It was crowded, of course, with holiday-seekers; but the only person that I noticed at first was the man sitting directly opposite to me—­ an honest, red-faced countryman, evidently on his way home from town, and at present deeply occupied with a morning paper which seemed to have a peculiar fascination for him, for as he raised his face his round eyes were full of horror.  I paid little attention to him, however, but, having the corner seat facing the engine, watched to see that Colliver did not change his compartment.  He did not appear again, and in a minute or two the whistle shrieked and we were off.

At first the countryman opposite made such a prodigious to-do with his piece of news that I could not help watching him.  Then my attention wandered from him to the country through which we were flying.  Slowly I pondered over the many events that had passed since, not many months before, I had travelled up from Cornwall to win my fortune.  My fortune!  To what had it all come?  I had won a golden month or two of love, and lo! my darling was dead.  Dead also was the friend who had travelled up with me, so full of boyish hope:  both dead; the one in the full blaze of her triumph, the other in the first dawn of his young success:  both dead—­and, but for me, both living yet and happy.

Suddenly the countryman looked up and spoke.

“Hav’ee seen this bit o’ news?  Astonishin’!  And her so pretty too!”

“What is it?” I asked vacantly.

For answer he pushed the paper into my hands, and with his thumb-nail pointed to a column headed “TERRIBLE TRAGEDY IN A THEATRE.”

“An’ to think,” he continued reflectively, “as how I saw her wi’ my own eyes but three nights back—­an’ actin’ so pretty, too!  Lord!  It made me cry like any sucking child:  beautiful it was—­just beau-ti-ful!  Here’s a story to tell my missus!”

I took the paper and read—­

“TERRIBLE TRAGEDY IN A THEATRE.  SUICIDE OF A FAMOUS ACTRESS.—­ Last evening, the performance of the new and popular tragedy, Francesca, at the Coliseum, was interrupted by a scene perhaps the most awful that has ever been presented to the play-going public.  A sinister fate seems to have pursued this play from the outset.  It will be within the memory of all that its young and gifted author was, on the very night of its production, struck down suddenly in the street by an unknown hand which the police have not yet succeeded in tracing.  Last night’s tragedy was even more terrible.  Clarissa Lambert, whose name—­”

But I wanted to read no more.  To the countryman’s astonishment the paper slipped from my listless fingers, and once more my gaze turned to the carriage window.  On we tore through the snow that raced horizontally by the pane, through the white and peaceful country—­ homeward.  Homeward to welcome whom?  Whom but the man now sitting, it might be, within a foot of me?  To my heart I hugged the thought of him, sitting there and gloating over the morrow.