Free The Mystery of the Blue Train by Agatha Christie Page B

face. Katherine turned also, but by that time whoever it was who had aroused the maid's interest had retreated into his or her compartment, and the corridor was empty. Katherine walked down it to regain her own place, which was in the next coach. As she passed the end compartment the door opened and a woman's face looked out for a moment and then pulled the door to sharply.
    It was a face not easily forgotten, as Katherine was to know when she saw it again. A beautiful face, oval and dark, very heavily made up in a bizarre fashion. Katherine had a feeling that she had seen it before somewhere.
    She regained her own compartment without other adventure and sat for some time thinking of the confidence which had just been made to her. She wondered idly who the woman in the mink coat might be, wondered also how the end of her story would turn out.
    “If I have stopped anyone from making an idiot of themselves, I suppose I have done good work,” she thought to herself. “But who knows? That is the kind of woman who is hard-headed and egotistical all her life, and it might be good for her to do the other sort of thing for a change. Oh, well - I don't suppose I shall ever see her again. She certainly won't want to see me again. That is the worst of letting people tell you things. They never do.”
    She hoped that she would not be given the same table at dinner. She reflected, not without humour, that it might be awkward for both of them. Leaning back with her head against a cushion she felt tired and vaguely depressed. They had reached Paris, and the slow journey round the ceinture, with its interminable stops and waits, was very wearisome.
    When they arrived at the Gare de Lyon she was glad to get out and walk up and down the platform. The keen cold air was refreshing after the steam-heated train.
    She observed with a smile that her friend of the mink coat was solving the possible awkwardness of the dinner problem in her own way. A dinner basket was being handed up and received through the window by the maid.
    When the train started once more, and dinner was announced by a violent ringing of bells, Katherine went along to it much relieved in mind. Her vis-а-vis tonight was of an entirely different kind - a small man, distinctly foreign in appearance, with a rigidly waxed moustache and an egg-shaped head which he carried rather on one side. Katherine had taken in a book to dinner with her. She found the little man's eyes fixed on it with a kind of twinkling amusement.
    “I see, Madame, that you have a Roman Policier. You are fond of such things?”
    “They amuse me,” Katherine admitted.
    The little man nodded with the air of complete understanding.
    “They have a good sale always, so I am told. Now why is that, eh, Mademoiselle? I ask it of you as a student of human nature - why should that be?”
    Katherine felt more and more amused.
    “Perhaps they give one the illusion of living an exciting life,” she suggested.
    He nodded gravely.
    “Yes, there is something in that.”
    “Of course, one knows that such things don't really happen,” Katherine was continuing, but he interrupted her sharply.
    “Sometimes, Mademoiselle! Sometimes! I who speak to you - they have happened to me.”
    She threw him a quick, interested glance.
    “Some day, who knows, you might be in the thick of things,” he went on. “It is all chance.”
    “I don't think it is likely,” said Katherine, “Nothing of that kind ever happens to me.”
    He leaned forward.
    “Would you like it to?”
    The question startled her, and she drew in her breath sharply.
    “It is my fancy, perhaps,” said the little man, as he dexterously polished one of the forks, “but I think that you have a yearning in you for interesting happenings. Eh bien, Mademoiselle, all through my life I have observed one thing - 'All one wants one gets!' Who knows?” His face screwed itself up comically. “You may get more than you bargain for.”
    “Is that a prophecy?”