“But won’t you be lonely by yourself in London?”

“A little lonely perhaps.”

Being satisfied that she had found out everything about me, my travelling companion (probably from the mere love of talking) told me something about herself.

She was a fashionable milliner and had a shop in the West End of London.  Occasionally she made personal visits to the provinces to take orders from the leading shopkeepers, but during the season she found it more profitable to remain in town, where her connection was large, among people who could pay the highest prices.

By this time we had reached Crewe, and as there was some delay in getting into the station, my travelling companion put her head out of the window to inquire the cause.  She was told that a night train from Scotland was in front of us, and we should have to be coupled on to it before we could proceed to London.

This threw her into the wildest state of excitement.

“I see what it is,” she said.  “The shooting season is over and the society people are coming down from the moors.  I know lots and lots of them.  They are my best customers—­the gentlemen at all events.”

“The gentlemen?”

“Why, yes,” she said with a little laugh.

After some shunting our Liverpool carriages were coupled to the Scotch train and run into the station, where a number of gentlemen in knickerbockers and cloth caps were strolling about the platform.

My companion seemed to know them all, and gave them their names, generally their Christian names, and often their familiar ones.

Suddenly I had a shock.  A tall man, whose figure I recognised, passed close by our carriage, and I had only time to conceal myself from observation behind the curtain of the window.

“Helloa!” cried my companion.  “There’s Teddy Eastcliff.  He married Camilla, the Russian dancer.  They first met in my shop I may tell you.”

I was feeling hot and cold by turns, but a thick veil must have hidden my confusion, for after we left Crewe my companion, becoming still more confidential, talked for a long time about her aristocratic customers, and I caught a glimpse of a life that was on the verge of a kind of fashionable Bohemia.

More than once I recognised my husband’s friends among the number of her clients, and trembling lest my husband himself should become a subject of discussion, I, made the excuse of a headache to close my eyes and be silent.

My companion thereupon slept, very soundly and rather audibly, from Rugby to Willesden, where, awakening with a start while the tickets were being collected, she first powdered her face by her fashion-glass and then interested herself afresh in my affairs.

“Did you say, my dear, that you have no friends in London?”

I repeated that I had none.

“Then you will go to an hotel, I suppose?”

I answered that I should have to look for something less expensive.