ZULEIKA DOBSON


I

That old bell, presage of a train, had just sounded through Oxford
station; and the undergraduates who were waiting there, gay figures
in tweed or flannel, moved to the margin of the platform and gazed
idly up the line. Young and careless, in the glow of the afternoon
sunshine, they struck a sharp note of incongruity with the worn boards
they stood on, with the fading signals and grey eternal walls of that
antique station, which, familiar to them and insignificant, does yet
whisper to the tourist the last enchantments of the Middle Age.

At the door of the first-class waiting-room, aloof and venerable,
stood the Warden of Judas. An ebon pillar of tradition seemed he, in
his garb of old-fashioned cleric. Aloft, between the wide brim of his
silk hat and the white extent of his shirt-front, appeared those eyes
which hawks, that nose which eagles, had often envied. He supported
his years on an ebon stick. He alone was worthy of the background.

Came a whistle from the distance. The breast of an engine was
descried, and a long train curving after it, under a flight of smoke.
It grew and grew. Louder and louder, its noise foreran it. It became a
furious, enormous monster, and, with an instinct for safety, all men
receded from the platform's margin. (Yet came there with it, unknown