"At four o'clock in the morning, M'sieur, an old gentleman and his wife
will get out at Strassburg, their destination. They are in this carriage
and you may take their compartment, if M'sieur will not object to
sleeping in a room just vacated by two mourners who to-day buried a
beloved son in Paris. They have kept all of the flowers in their--"
"Four o'clock! Good Lord, what am I to do till then?" groaned Brock,
glaring with unmanly hatred at the door of the Medcroft compartment.
"Perhaps Madame may be willing to take the upper--" ventured the guard
timorously, but Brock checked him with a peremptory gesture. He
proposed, instead, the luggage van, whereupon the guard burst into a
psalm of utter dejection. It was against the rules, irrevocably.
"Then I guess I'll have to sit here all night," said Brock faintly. He
was forgetting his English.
"If M'sieur will not occupy his own bed, yes," said the guard, shrugging
his shoulders and washing his hands of the whole incomprehensible
affair. "M'sieur will then be up to receive the Customs officers at the
frontier. Perhaps he will give me the keys to Madame's trunks, so that
she may not be disturbed."
"Ask her for 'em yourself," growled Brock, after one dazed moment of
dismay.
The hours crawled slowly by. He paced the length of the wriggling
corridor a hundred times, back and forth; he sat on every window-seat in
the carriage; he nodded and dozed and groaned, and laughed at himself in
the deepest derision all through the dismal night.
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