Though the third-class compartment which the Bannerman family had secured to themselves would have seated ten full-grown people with comfort, it now appeared so to overflow with animated life that other travellers, valise in hand, passed it after one hesitating glance through its windows. Certainly the children from the moment of their entrance did everything they could think of to repel fellow-passengers. Not only was this by tradition essential to the joy of a journey, but if strangers got in, Mrs. Bannerman was sure to talk to them. She loved and idealized strangers, eagerly furnished them with reading matter, and was swift in leading the talk to eternal verities – all of which was a severe trial to her daughters in their sensitive teens. In most ways leading quite detached lives, and feeling a good deal of contempt, each for the other, Georgie and Joanna were at one in this: they hated any publication of their mother’s peculiarities.

And so young Sholto was posted at one of the platform windows and told to grimace with all his might at anyone who seemed to have designs on the door-handle, while behind him, Linnet, disguised as an invalid, lay at full length, propped slightly by a hold-all and covered to the chin with his mother’s shepherd’s-plaid shawl. In another window an umbrella, crowned with Sholto’s glengarry and draped with Linnet’s reefer coat, served as an additional scarecrow.

In all this the leader was clearly Georgie. She gave her orders in Double Dutch, a secret family language much used and treasured by the four, and the younger ones did her bidding more or less. To the mother’s fitful supplication for quiet, no one paid much attention. But really Juley was as youthfully elated as any of her children at the adventure of travelling, and they knew it. Her satisfaction, together with great pride in her unmanageable flock, beamed from her. She enjoyed, too, arranging the hand-luggage on the racks and beneath the seats, and was joyfully looking forward to opening the letters of that morning, one letter bearing the Philadelphia postmark. She had a day-old newspaper to read as well, and had brought with it several issues of The Believer and of Distant Lands – some of these still in their uncut wrappers of weeks ago and showing marks of dust. In the current number of The Believer she knew there was a breezily up-to-date article by her husband, entitled “Are Miracles Essential?” To read with a clear conscience was a luxury Juley never enjoyed at home, where calls on her time and strength were unending, and household duties, in spite of her three servants, ever in arrears. Already on this journey she had expressed some of her pleasant anticipations to the kind guard who sympathized with their loss of the other train. Next, to her daughters’ distress she confided in the ticket-collector. “We are going,” she told him, “to the Assembly of our dear Free Church.”