McCurdie lit a
pipe, Doyne another black cigar. The train thundered on.
Presently they all lunched together in the restaurant car. The windows
steamed, but here and there through a wiped patch of pane a white world
was revealed. The snow was falling. As they passed through Westbury,
McCurdie looked mechanically for the famous white horse carved into the
chalk of the down; but it was not visible beneath the thick covering of
snow.
"It'll be just like this all the way to Gehenna--Trehenna, I mean," said
McCurdie.
Doyne nodded. He had done his life's work amid all extreme fiercenesses
of heat and cold, in burning droughts, in simoons and in icy
wildernesses, and a ray or two more of the pale sun or a flake or two
more of the gentle snow of England mattered to him but little. But
Biggleswade rubbed the pane with his table-napkin and gazed
apprehensively at the prospect.
"If only this wretched train would stop," said he, "I would go back
again."
And he thought how comfortable it would be to sneak home again to his
books and thus elude not only the Deverills, but the Christmas jollities
of his sisters' families, who would think him miles away. But the train
was timed not to stop till Plymouth, two hundred and thirty-five miles
from London, and thither was he being relentlessly carried.
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