The clergyman, who appeared to feel the friendlessness of the young girl and the old woman a charge laid upon him, bestowed a sort of fatherly protection upon them both.  He advised them to stop at a hotel for a few hours and take the later train for London that he and his wife were going up by; they drove to the hotel together, where Mrs. Lander could not be kept from paying the omnibus, and made them have luncheon with her.  She allowed the clergyman to get her tickets, and she could not believe that he had taken second class tickets for himself and his wife.  She said that she had never heard of anyone travelling second class before, and she assured him that they never did it in America.  She begged him to let her pay the difference, and bring his wife into her compartment, which the guard had reserved for her.  She urged that the money was nothing to her, compared with the comfort of being with some one you knew; and the clergyman had to promise that as they should be neighbors, he would look in upon her, whenever the train stopped long enough.

Before it began to move, Clementina thought she saw Lord Lioncourt hurrying past their carriage-window.  At Rugby the clergyman appeared, but almost before he could speak, Lord Lioncourt’s little red face showed at his elbow.  He asked Clementina to present him to Mrs. Lander, who pressed him to get into her compartment; the clergyman vanished, and Lord Lioncourt yielded.

Mrs. Lander found him able to tell her the best way to get to Florence, whose situation he seemed to know perfectly; he confessed that he had been there rather often.  He made out a little itinerary for going straight through by sleeping-car as soon as you crossed the Channel; she had said that she always liked a through train when she could get it, and the less stops the better.  She bade Clementina take charge of the plan and not lose it; without it she did not see what they could do.  She conceived of him as a friend of Clementina’s, and she lost in the strange environment the shyness she had with most people.  She told him how Mr. Lander had made his money, and from what beginnings he rose to be ignorant of what he really was worth when he died.  She dwelt upon the diseases they had suffered, and at the thought of his death, so unnecessary in view of the good that the air was already doing her in Europe, she shed tears.

Lord Lioncourt was very polite, but there was no resumption of the ship’s comradery in his manner.  Clementina could not know how quickly this always drops from people who have been fellow-passengers; and she wondered if he were guarding himself from her because she had danced at the charity entertainment.  The poison which Mrs. Milray had instilled worked in her thoughts while she could not help seeing how patient he was with all Mrs. Lander’s questions; he answered them with a simplicity of his own, or laughed and put them by, when they were quite impossible.  Many of them related to the comparative merits of English