Soon it was all over, and the little house-hold was compressed into the humble second class carriage, cheerless and cushionless, whirling through indefinite England in a way that confounded all their geography and topography.  Gradually as the day darkened into heavy, chilly July rain, the scarcely kept up spirits of the four passengers began to sink.  Johanna grew very white and worn, Selina became, to use Ascott’s phrase, “as cross as two sticks,” and even Hilary, turning her eyes from the gray sodden looking landscape without, could find no spot of comfort to rest on within the carriage, except that round rosy face of Elizabeth Hand’s.

Whether it was from the spirit of contradiction existing in most such natures, which, especially in youth, are more strong than sweet, or from a better feeling, the fact was noticeable, that when every one else’s spirits went down Elizabeth’s went up.  Nothing could bring her out of a “grumpy” fit so satisfactorily as her mistresses falling into one.  When Miss Selina now began to fidget hither and thither, each tone of her fretful voice seeming to go through her eldest sister’s every nerve, till even Hilary said, impatiently, “Oh, Selina, can’t you be quiet?” then Elizabeth rose from the depth of her gloomy discontent up to the surface immediately.

She was only a servant; but Nature bestows that strange vague thing that we term “force of character” independently of position.  Hilary often remembered afterward, how much more comfortable the end of the journey was than she had expected—­how Johanna lay at ease, with her feet in Elizabeth’s lap, wrapped in Elizabeth’s best woolen shawl; and how, when Selina’s whole attention was turned to an ingenious contrivance with a towel and fork and Elizabeth’s basket, for stopping the rain out of the carriage roof—­she became far less disagreeable, and even a little proud of her own cleverness.  And so there was a temporary lull in Hilary’s cares, and she could sit quiet, with her eyes fixed on the rainy landscape, which she did not see, and her thoughts wandering toward that unknown place and unknown life into which they were sweeping, as we all sweep, ignorantly, unresistingly, almost unconsciously, into new destinies.  Hilary, for the first time, began to doubt of theirs.  Anxious as she had been to go to London, and wise as the proceeding appeared, now that the die was cast and the cable cut, the old simple, peaceful life at Stowbury grew strangely dear.

“I wonder if we shall ever go back again, or what is to happen to us before we do go back,” she thought, and turned, with a half defined fear, toward her eldest sister, who looked so old and fragile beside that sturdy, healthful servant girl.  “Elizabeth!” Elizabeth, rubbing Miss Leaf’s feet, started at the unwonted sharpness of Miss Hilary’s tone.

“There; I’ll do that for my sister.  Go and look out of the window at London.”

For the great smoky cloud which began to rise in the rainy horizon was indeed London.  Soon through the thickening nebula of houses they converged to what was then the nucleus of all railway traveling, the Euston Terminus, and were hustled on to the platform, and jostled helplessly to and fro these poor country ladies!  Anxiously they scanned the crowd of strange faces for the one only face they knew in the great metropolis—­which did not appear.