"I have no mother," Clarissa said mournfully; "mine died when I was quite a
little thing. I always envy people who can speak of a mother."

"But, on the other hand, I am fatherless, you see," the gentleman said,
smiling. But Clarissa's face did not reflect his smile.

"Ah, that is a different thing," she said softly.

They went on talking for a long while, talking about the widest range of
subjects; and their flight across the moonlit country, which grew darker
by-and-by, as that tender light waned, seemed swifter than. Clarissa could
have imagined possible, had the train been the most desperate thing in the
way of an express. She had no vulgar commonplace shyness, mere school-girl
as she was, and she had, above all, a most delightful unconsciousness of
her own beauty; so she was quickly at home with the stranger, listening to
him, and talking to him with a perfect ease, which seemed to him a natural
attribute of high breeding.

"A Lovel," he said to himself once, in a brief interval of silence; "and so
she comes of that unlucky race. It is scarcely strange that she should be
beautiful and gifted. I wonder what my mother would say if she knew that my
northern journey had brought me for half-a-dozen hours _tete-a-tete_ with
a Lovel? There would be actual terror for her in the notion of such an
accident. What a noble look this girl has!--an air that only comes after
generations of blue blood untainted by vulgar admixture. The last of such
a race is a kind of crystallisation, dangerously, fatally brilliant, the
concentration of all the forces that have gone before."

At one of their halting-places, Miss Lovel's companion insisted upon