CHAPTER THREE.
"This is not a smoking-carriage," Mrs.Norman protested, nervously but very feebly, as the door swung open and a powerfully built young man jumped in.

He seemed not to hear her.

The train did not stop before it reached Cambridge, and here she was shut up alone, in a railway carriage, with a young man.
She touched the spring of her dressing-case, and ascertained that the scent-bottle and a novel from Mudie's were both handy (the young man was standing up with his back to her, putting his bag in the rack).

She would throw the scent-bottle with her right hand, she decided, and tug the communication cord with her left.

She was fifty years of age, and had a son at college.