slab-like flatness. Her forehead is high and full, and its bulging
outlines are but slightly softened by a thin and dishevelled bang. Her
eyes are of a light and faded blue, and have the peculiar stare which
results from over-full eyeballs when completely bordered by white. Her
long fingers show knotted joints and nails that seem hopelessly plebeian;
sometimes she draws on open-work lace mitts, and then her hands appear to
be embroiling each other in a mutual tragedy. No, poor Jane is
thoroughly, incorruptibly indigenous; she is the best and dearest girl in
half the world, as you shall see; but all her experiences have lain
between Sandusky and Omaha.

Perhaps, then, the returned traveller is the elderly woman seated by her
side. Perhaps--and perhaps not. For she seems a bit too dry and sapless
and self-contained--as little susceptible, in fact, to the gentle dews of
travel as an umbrella in a waterproof case. Moreover, it is doubtful if
her bonnet would pass current beyond the national confines. One surmises
that she became years ago the victim of arrested development; that she
is a kind of antiquated villager--a geologic survival from an earlier
age; that she is a house-keeper cumbered and encompassed by minute cares
largely of her own making. It is an easy guess that, for Eliza Marshall,
London is in another world, that Tangier is but a remote and
impracticable abstraction, and that all her strength and fortitude might
be necessary merely to make the trip to Peoria.

There is but one other occupant of the carriage remaining--the only one,
after all, who can or could be the owner of the baggage. He is a young
man of twenty-three, and he sits with his back to the horse on a little
seat which has been let down for the occasion between the usual two; his
knees crowd one of the girls and his elbows the other. He seems
uncommonly alert and genial; he focusses brilliantly the entire attention