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A few minutes later a well-appointed vehicle drew up at the door of the shed. "There you are!" said the German officer roughly. "I am sending you to Gonesse, where you will find the provision train which starts in an hour. I am recommending you to the care of the station-master, the Commandant X. After that may God take care of you!"
That STATION-MASTER with the beard ought to have lived for ever. His niche in the Temple of Fame was sure. One evening he had called in full uniform at the house and asked to see Master Henry Rogers, the boy who had got out 'WHILE-THE- TRAIN-WAS-STILL-IN-MOTION, and had lectured him gravely with a face like death.
The station-master was nowhere to be seen. The two women stood huddling together under one umbrella, gazing blankly about them. "Is this Mrs. Philbrick?" came in clear, firm tones, out of the darkness behind them; and, in a second more, Mercy had turned and looked up into Stephen White's face. "Oh, how good you were to come and meet us!" exclaimed Mercy. "You are Mr. Allen's friend, I suppose."
"Very well. . . . I won't take the ticket . . . as you like . . . . Only, of course, as you know very well, it's my duty to do so. . . . If it were not my duty, then, of course. . . You can ask the station-master . . . ask anyone you like. . . ." Podtyagin shrugs his shoulders and walks away from the invalid.
"Is that the London train?" he asked eagerly, starting to his feet. "It is, sir. Are you going by it?" "No o, oh no," said Thomas. His face flushed and his hands shook as a carriage door opened here and there and a passenger got out. "Are 'ee expecting somebody?" asked the station-master, with just a touch of impatience in his voice.
Lexman," said the station-master, "I will telephone up to the village and get Briggs to come down for you." John Lexman looked out upon the dripping landscape and shrugged his shoulders.
"Well, gentlemen, can't we arrange it like this?" he says, kindled by a new idea that has flashed on him. "The troop train is late,... as you see, it is not here,... so why shouldn't you go as the troop train? And I will let the troop train go as twenty-eight. Eh?" "If you like," agrees the guard. "Excellent!" the station-master says, delighted.
But sacred horror held me back. The station-master of Sedan came to my carriage, and explained to me what I had before my eyes. I seemed to see, through his words, the pale lightnings of the battle.
The station-master's sole lingual accomplishment was French. This concatenation of circumstances might with ordinary persons have led to some diminution of the force of adjuration. But probably the station-master lost little of the meaning the Patriarch desired to convey.
Then followed a moment of bustle, while the station-master and the one porter went in search of the luggage, and the children were led up to identify the various things as they should be lifted out. When they were told that the two shabby trunks were all there were to identify, disappointment was only too plainly written on the men's faces.
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