The train itself was dark. Frosty windows, pelted for miles by the
furious gale, white outside but black within, protected the snug
travellers who slept the sleep of the hurried and thought not of
the storm that beat about their ears nor wondered at the stopping
of the fast express at a place where it had never stopped before.
Far ahead the panting engine shed from its open fire-box an aureole
of glaring red as the stoker fed coal into its rapacious maw. The
unblinking head-light threw its rays into the thick of the blinding
snow storm, fruitlessly searching for the rails through drifts
denser than fog and filled with strange, half-visible shapes.

An order had been issued for the stopping of the fast express at
B--, a noteworthy concession in these days of premeditated haste.
Not in the previous career of flying 33 had it even so much as
slowed down for the insignificant little station, through which it
swooped at midnight the whole year round. Just before pulling out
of New York on this eventful night the conductor received a command
to stop 33 at B---- and let down a single passenger, a circumstance
which meant trouble for every despatcher along the line.

The woman who got down at B---- in the wake of the shivering
but deferential porter, and who passed by the conductors without
lifting her face, was without hand luggage of any description.
She was heavily veiled, and warmly clad in furs. At eleven o'clock
that night she had entered the compartment in New York. Throughout
the thirty miles or more, she had sat alone and inert beside the
snow-clogged window, peering through veil and frost into the night
that whizzed past the pane, seeing nothing yet apparently intent
on all that stretched beyond. As still, as immobile as death itself