“Do you know these?  I always take them travelling.  Finest things ever written, aren’t they?”

The book—­Shakespeare’s Sonnets—­was open at that which begins: 

     “Let me not to the marriage of true minds
        Admit impediments.  Love is not love
      Which alters when it alteration finds,
        Or bends with the remover to remove—­”

Gyp read on as far as the lines: 

     “Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
        Within his bending sickle’s compass come. 
      Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks
        But bears it out even to the edge of doom—­”

and looked out of the window.  The train was passing through a country of fields and dykes, where the sun, far down in the west, shone almost level over wide, whitish-green space, and the spotted cattle browsed or stood by the ditches, lazily flicking their tufted tails.  A shaft of sunlight flowed into the carriage, filled with dust motes; and, handing the little book back through that streak of radiance, she said softly: 

“Yes; that’s wonderful.  Do you read much poetry?”

“More law, I’m afraid.  But it is about the finest thing in the world, isn’t it?”

“No; I think music.”

“Are you a musician?”

“Only a little.”

“You look as if you might be.”

“What?  A little?”

“No; I should think you had it badly.”

“Thank you.  And you haven’t it at all?”

“I like opera.”

“The hybrid form—­and the lowest!”

“That’s why it suits me.  Don’t you like it, though?”

“Yes; that’s why I’m going up to London.”

“Really?  Are you a subscriber?”

“This season.”

“So am I. Jolly—­I shall see you.”

Gyp smiled.  It was so long since she had talked to a man of her own age, so long since she had seen a face that roused her curiosity and admiration, so long since she had been admired.  The sun-shaft, shifted by a westward trend of the train, bathed her from the knees up; and its warmth increased her light-hearted sense of being in luck—­above her fate, instead of under it.

Astounding how much can be talked of in two or three hours of a railway journey!  And what a friendly after-warmth clings round those hours!  Does the difficulty of making oneself heard provoke confidential utterance?  Or is it the isolation or the continual vibration that carries friendship faster and further than will a spasmodic acquaintanceship of weeks?  But in that long talk he was far the more voluble.  There was, too, much of which she could not speak.  Besides, she liked to listen.  His slightly drawling voice fascinated her—­his audacious, often witty way of putting things, and the irrepressible bubble of laughter that would keep breaking from him.  He disclosed his past, such as it was, freely—­public-school and college life, efforts at the bar, ambitions, tastes, even his scrapes.  And in this spontaneous unfolding there was perpetual flattery; Gyp felt through it all, as pretty women will, a sort of subtle admiration.  Presently he asked her if she played piquet.