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case of these tweedsuited wanderers is unique. We have all seen them
entering the table d'hote (at Spezzia, or Grdtz, or Venice) with a
genteel melancholy and a faint appearance of having been to India and
not succeeded. In the offices of many hundred hotels they are known by
name; and yet, if the whole of this wandering cohort were to disappear
tomorrow, their absence would be wholly unremarked. How much more, if
only one--say this one in the ventilating cloth--should vanish! He had
paid his bills at Bournemouth; his worldly effects were all in the van
in two portmanteaux, and these after the proper interval would be
sold as unclaimed baggage to a Jew; Sir Faraday's butler would be a
half-crown poorer at the year's end, and the hotelkeepers of Europe
about the same date would be mourning a small but quite observable
decline in profits. And that would be literally all. Perhaps the old
gentleman thought something of the sort, for he looked melancholy enough
as he pulled his bare, grey head back into the carriage, and the train
smoked under the bridge, and forth, with ever quickening speed, across
the mingled heaths and woods of the New Forest.
Not many hundred yards beyond Browndean, however, a sudden jarring of
brakes set everybody's teeth on edge, and there was a brutal stoppage.
Morris Finsbury was aware of a confused uproar of voices, and sprang to
the window. Women were screaming, men were tumbling from the windows
on
the track, the guard was crying to them to stay where they were; at the
same time the train began to gather way and move very slowly backward
toward Browndean; and the next moment--, all these various sounds were
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