of new acquaintances. You must be used to snakes. Perhaps you've
kept one? You're accustomed of old to their ways and manners?"

"No, indeed," Elma cried, laughing in spite of herself, a clear
little laugh of feminine triumph; for she had made a conquest, she
saw, of Sardanapalus; "I never so much as touched one in all my
life before. And I thought I should hate them. But this one seems
quite tame and tractable. I'm not in the least afraid of him. He is
so soft and smooth, and his movements are all so perfectly gentle."

"Ah, that's the way with snakes, always," Cyril Waring put in,
with an admiring glance at the pretty, fearless brunette and her
strange companion. "They know at once whether people like them or
not, and they govern themselves accordingly. I suppose it's instinct.
When they see you're afraid of them, they spring and hiss; but when
they see you take to them by nature, they make themselves perfectly
at home in a moment. They don't wait to be asked. They've no false
modesty. Well, then, you see," he went on, drawing imaginary lines
with his ticket on the sketch he was holding up, "I shall work in
Sardanapalus just there, like that, coiled round in a spire. You
catch the idea, don't you?"

As he spoke, Elma's eye, following his hand while it moved, chanced
to fall suddenly on the name of the station printed on the ticket
with which he was pointing. She gave a sharp little start.

"Warnworth!" she cried, flushing up, with some slight embarrassment
in her voice; "why, that's ever so far back. We're long past
Warnworth. We ran by it three or four stations behind; in fact,
it's the next place to Chetwood, where I got in at."