The Orient Express, in which Carlton and the mistress of his heart and fancy were speeding towards the horizon’s utmost purple rim, was made up of six cars, one dining-car with a smoking-apartment attached, and five sleeping-cars, including the one reserved for the Duke of Hohenwald and his suite.  These cars were lightly built, and rocked in consequence, and the dust raised by the rapid movement of the train swept through cracks and open windows, and sprinkled the passengers with a fine and irritating coating of soot and earth.  There was one servant to the entire twenty-two passengers.  He spoke eight languages, and never slept; but as his services were in demand by several people in as many different cars at the same moment he satisfied no one, and the complaint-box in the smoking-car was stuffed full to the slot in consequence before they had crossed the borders of France.

Carlton and Miss Morris went out upon one of the platforms and sat down upon a tool-box.  “It’s isn’t as comfortable here as in an observation-car at home,” said Carlton, “but it’s just as noisy.”

He pointed out to her from time to time the peasants gathering twigs, and the blue-bloused gendarmes guarding the woods and the fences skirting them.  “Nothing is allowed to go to waste in this country,” he said.  “It looks as though they went over it once a month with a lawn-mower and a pruning-knife.  I believe they number the trees as we number the houses.”

“And did you notice the great fortifications covered with grass?” she said.  “We have passed such a lot of them.”

Carlton nodded.

“And did you notice that they all faced only one way?”

Carlton laughed, and nodded again.  “Towards Germany,” he said.

By the next day they had left the tall poplars and white roads behind them, and were crossing the land of low shiny black helmets and brass spikes.  They had come into a country of low mountains and black forests, with old fortified castles topping the hills, and with red-roofed villages scattered around the base.

“How very military it all is!” Mrs. Downs said.  “Even the men at the lonely little stations in the forests wear uniforms; and do you notice how each of them rolls up his red flag and holds it like a sword, and salutes the train as it passes?”

They spent the hour during which the train shifted from one station in Vienna to the other driving about in an open carriage, and stopped for a few moments in front of a cafe to drink beer and to feel solid earth under them again, returning to the train with a feeling which was almost that of getting back to their own rooms.  Then they came to great steppes covered with long thick grass, and flooded in places with little lakes of broken ice; great horned cattle stood knee-deep in this grass, and at the villages and way-stations were people wearing sheepskin jackets and waistcoats covered with silver buttons.  In one place there was a wedding procession waiting