‘The reason is good for courting the income.’

He disliked the remark; and when she said presently: 

‘Those windmills make the landscape homely,’ he rejoined:  ’They remind one of our wheeling London gamins round the cab from the station.’

‘They remind you,’ said she, and smiled at the chance discordant trick he had, remembering occasions when it had crossed her.

‘This is homelier than Rovio,’ she said; ‘quite as nice in its way.’

‘You do not gather flowers here.’

‘Because my friend has these at her feet.’

‘May one petition without a rival, then, for a souvenir?’

‘Certainly, if you care to have a common buttercup.’

They reached the station, five minutes in advance of the train.  His coming manoeuvre was early detected, and she drew from her pocket the little book he had seen lying unopened on the table, and said:  ’I shall have two good hours for reading.’

’You will not object? . . .  I must accompany you to town.  Permit it, I beg.  You shall not be worried to talk.’

‘No; I came alone and return alone.’

’Fasting and unprotected!  Are you determined to take away the worst impression of us?  Do not refuse me this favour.’

’As to fasting, I could not eat:  and unprotected no woman is in England, if she is a third-class traveller.  That is my experience of the class; and I shall return among my natural protectors—­the most unselfishly chivalrous to women in the whole world.’

He had set his heart on going with her, and he attempted eloquence in pleading, but that exposed him to her humour; he was tripped.

‘It is not denied that you belong to the knightly class,’ she said; ’and it is not necessary that you should wear armour and plumes to proclaim it; and your appearance would be ample protection from the drunken sailors travelling, you say, on this line; and I may be deplorably mistaken in imagining that I could tame them.  But your knightliness is due elsewhere; and I commit myself to the fortune of war.  It is a battle for women everywhere; under the most favourable conditions among my dear common English.  I have not my maid with me, or else I should not dare.’

She paid for a third-class ticket, amused by Dacier’s look of entreaty and trouble.

‘Of course I obey,’ he murmured.

‘I have the habit of exacting it in matters concerning my independence,’ she said; and it arrested some rumbling notions in his head as to a piece of audacity on the starting of the train.  They walked up and down the platform till the bell rang and the train came rounding beneath an arch.

’Oh, by the way, may I ask?’—­he said:  ’was it your article in Whitmonby’s journal on a speech of mine last week?’

‘The guilty writer is confessed.’

‘Let me thank you.’

’Don’t.  But try to believe it written on public grounds—­if the task is not too great.’