Of course there was no porter. In those days there never were any porters at a Belgian country station. If you didn't _expédier_ your baggage (as every self-respecting traveler should), you had to carry it yourself. Lettice's baggage was what is known as a pilgrim basket, gone at the corners, with a double strap which had slipped into a string round its middle, leaving the ends bulging. Bending to it like a patient donkey, she trailed across the loose gray gravel to the exit, and at last was outside in the road. The Café de la Gare confronted her, a yellow house with red facings and a blue slate roof. "Bureau de la diligence" appeared on its sign, but the customary shabby, dirty, stuffy, rickety ruin of a two-horse shandrydan was nowhere to be seen.
A smart commissionaire had seized her basket. Round his cap in gilt lettering ran the words, "Hôtel Bellevue." Lettice nodded distrustfully, and in a trice was whisked round the corner, still clinging to her strap. Behold the diligence of the Hôtel Bellevue--a brand-new motor char-à-banc, glistening in tan-colored varnish! The commissionaire threw open the door with a flourish worthy of the boulevards, and Lettice subsided in a corner as if her patient knees had at last given way.
In the fresh air she presently revived enough to take notice of her fellow-travelers. There were two, both women, the elder obviously a maid. Lettice had seen them before, at Dinant, descending from a _voiture-salon_ with a porter in attendance, and had marked them with a malevolent eye, having tried in vain to secure that porter herself. But even without that memory she would have noticed the younger of the two.
She was a tall slip of a girl, scarcely out of her teens, but not dressed like an _ingénue_. Her French hat, her furs, her gloves, the exquisite cloth of her suit, all her traveling appointments might have belonged to a married woman of thirty. Yet she was not married, for there was no wedding ring among the diamonds on her finger, and Lettice, whose eyes were as good as opera-glasses, could read the label on the gold-mounted dressing-case in the rack above her head--Miss D. M. O'Connor, Hôtel Bellevue. She looked fragile, as if recovering from an illness, and her figure was still slender and undeveloped; but she had masses of exquisitely glossy dark hair, and great dark eyes, full of fire and gloom. Young though she was, she knew how to get herself obeyed. When she scowled (and she could scowl, with those black brows), even a Belgian porter came to attention. Lettice was wondering what it was that had set her at odds with the world, and written such bitterness on the small, brooding face, when the dark eyes looked up and met hers with a smile, sudden and child-like, which had just the effect of a sunburst over a gloomy landscape.