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Updated: May 8, 2025
As Coxeter went through the hall, filled with a perplexity and pain very alien from his positive nature, a good-looking, clean-shaven man, who gave him a quick measured glance, passed by. With him there had been no parleying at the door as in Coxeter's own case. "Who's that?" he asked, with a scowl, of the servant. "The doctor, sir," and he felt absurdly relieved.
His feeling of bored disgust was intensified by the conduct of a long-nosed, sallow man, who had put his luggage into the same carriage as that where Coxeter's seat had been reserved. Strange how the peculiar characteristics common to the Jewish race survive, whatever be the accident of nationality.
It was a graceful, welcoming gesture, and John Coxeter's pulse began to quicken.... He told himself that this also was an extraordinary thing this journey with the woman he had wished to make his wife. He felt her to be so tantalizingly near, and yet in a sense so very far away. His eyes fell on her right hand, still encased in his large brown glove.
The passion of love, that greatest of the Protean riddles set by nature to civilized man and woman, played no part, or so Nan Archdale believed, in John Coxeter's life.
Coxeter's thoughts leapt back into the present with disagreeable abruptness. Their Jewish fellow-traveller, the man who had thrust on Mrs. Archdale such unseemly confidences, had got up. He was now heading straight for the place where Mrs. Archdale was sitting. Coxeter quickly decided that the fellow must not be allowed to bore Mrs. Archdale.
Coxeter's right hand gripped firmly Mrs. Archdale's arm. She was pressing closely to his side, shrinking back from the rough crowd surging about them, and he was filled with a fierce protective tenderness which left no room in his mind for any thought of self.
The queer little model which its maker believed would in time supersede the life-belts now carried on every British ship, had but one merit, it was small and portable: at the present moment it lay curled up, looking like a cross between a serpent's cast skin and a child's spent balloon, in Coxeter's portmanteau.
Another man would have found easy terms of endearment and comfort for almost any woman so thrust on his protection and care, but the very depth of Coxeter's feeling seemed to make him dumb, that and his anguished fear lest by his fault, by his own want of quickness, she had perhaps missed her chance of being saved. But what he was lacking another man supplied.
In a sense this room always pleased Coxeter's fancy, partly because it implied a great many things that money and even modern culture cannot buy. But now, this morning for it was still early, and he was on his way to his office for the first time since what an aunt of his had called his mysterious preservation from death he seemed to see everything in this room in another light.
When at last they reached Boulogne and went on board the packet, Coxeter's ill-humour vanished. It was cold, raw, and foggy, and most of their fellow-passengers at once hurried below, but Mrs. Archdale decided to stay on the upper deck. This pleased her companion; now at last he would have her to himself.
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