A room of magnificent size; furnished with every conventional luxury that money can buy; lavishly provided with newspapers and books of reference; lighted by tall windows in the day-time, and by gorgeous chandeliers at night, may be nevertheless one of the dreariest places of rest and shelter that can be found on the civilised earth.

Such places exist, by hundreds, in those hotels of monstrous proportions and pretensions, which now engulf the traveller who ends his journey on the pier or the platform.

It may be that we feel ourselves to be strangers among strangers--it may be that there is something innately repellent in splendid carpets and curtains, chairs and tables, which have no social associations to recommend them--it may be that the mind loses its elasticity under the inevitable restraint on friendly communication, which expresses itself in lowered tones and instinctive distrust of our next neighbour; but this alone is certain: life, in the public drawing-room of a great hotel, is life with all its healthiest emanations perishing in an exhausted receiver.
On the same day, and nearly at the same hour, when Ovid had left his house, two women sat in a corner of the public room, in one of the largest of the railway hotels latterly built in London.
Without observing it themselves, they were objects of curiosity to their fellow-travellers.

They spoke to each other in a foreign language.
They were dressed in deep mourning--with an absence of fashion and a simplicity of material which attracted the notice of every other woman in the room.

One of them wore a black veil over her gray hair.