The Splendid Folly | Page 9

to sleep.
"But supposing I didn't wake at the right time?" she objected. "I might
be carried past my station and find myself heaven knows where in the
small hours of the morning! . . . I am sleepy, though."
"Let me be call-boy," he suggested. "Where do you want to get out?"
"At Craiford Junction. That's the station for Crailing, where I'm going.
Do you know it at all? It's a tiny village in Devonshire; my guardian is
the Rector there."
"Crailing?" An odd expression crossed his face and he hesitated a
moment. At last, apparently coming to a decision of some kind, he said:

"Then I must wake you up when I go, as I'm getting out before that."
"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.
"What's happened? What's happened? What's happened?"
She was whispering the question over and over again in a queer,
whimpering voice without the remotest idea of what she was saying.
When a stinging pain shot through her arm, as a jagged point of broken
glass bit into the flesh, and with a scream of utter, unreasoning terror
she let go her hold.
The next moment she felt herself grasped and held by a pair of arms,

and a voice spoke to her out of the darkness.
"Are you hurt? . . . My God, are you hurt?"
With a sob of relief she realised that it was the voice of her
fellow-traveller. He was here, close to her, something alive and human
in the midst of this nightmare of awful, unspeakable fear, and she clung
to him, shuddering.
"Speak, can't you?" His utterance sounded hoarse and distorted.
"You're hurt--?" And she felt his hands slide searchingly along her
limbs, feeling and groping.