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in a third class carriage where the competition with other heavily-bribed porters is not so keen. A widow with three little girls, who tried to assert a prior claim, was pushed out into the corridor, and the Giffords were installed, supplied with luncheon tickets, sweets and magazines, and instructed to apply to the guard if they wanted anything.
    Sentiment among their travelling companions had been on the side of the widow, and nothing about the Giffords was likely to change it. They had an unusually well-nourished look, and no family could have been so faultlessly dressed on its legal clothing coupons. They belonged quite clearly to the kind of people who feed in the Black Market, who wear smuggled nylons and who, in an epoch of shortages, do not scruple to secure more than their share.
    But mankind is strangely tolerant, especially to children,and the sins of their parents would not have been visited upon the Giffords if they had not behaved as though they owned the train. They played a very noisy game of Animal Grab during the first part of the journey, and Hebe insisted upon letting her cat out of its basket. It was this careless arrogance which brought retribution upon her, and upon Caroline and Luke and Michael. For when they went down the train to luncheon their seats were re-occupied by the widow and her family, and nobody interfered to stop it.
    There was no aroma of the Black Market, or of clothing books purchased from needy charwomen, about the newcomers . They looked like an illustration in a ‘Save Europe’ pamphlet. Everything they had was meagre. The three girls were tall and pallid, like plants which have been grown in the dark. Their teeth were prominent but they wore no straightening braces; their pale blue eyes were myopic, but they wore no spectacles. Their hair was home cut, in a pudding basin bob, and their shabby cotton dresses barely covered their bony knees.
    The widow herself was a spare little woman, grim and competent. She whisked her family into the compartment as soon as the last Gifford had vanished down the corridor, thrust each docile child into its appointed seat, removed all the Gifford luggage from the rack and replaced it with her own. She did this with a speed and in a silence which might have daunted protest, if any had been offered.
    Having taken her own seat she produced, from a string bag, a packet of dry-looking pilchard sandwiches, dealt out three apiece, and handed round water in an enamel mug. At the end of this Spartan meal she provided the children with pieces of grey knitting. But not a single word did any of them say.
    A gloom settled upon the compartment and the pendulum of public sympathy swung back a little towards the handsome, noisy Giffords. It seemed that this woman was familiar. Everyone felt that they had met her before.She had appropriated something from each of them at one time or another, with the same speed and competence . She had got in front of them in the bus queue. She had snatched the last piece of fish off the slab under their noses. And her children, spiritlessly knitting, were her weapons.
    But the pendulum swung back again when the Giffords, flushed with food, came hallooing back along the corridor, pushing past the standing travellers and trampling on their feet. Such a set of young hooligans could be left to fend for themselves.
    There was a stupefied pause while the Giffords discovered their baggage in the corridor, and, peering through the window, identified the intruders.
    ‘It’s the orphanage,’ said Hebe. ‘They’ve pinched our seats.’
    For she had noticed these thin girls in the corridor and had decided that they must be orphans travelling in charge of a matron. And she had wondered if she would have looked as awful as they did if Lady Gifford had not adopted her to be a sister to Garoline.
    ‘What beastly cheek,’ said Luke.
    Caroline suggested that they should summon the guard. But Hebe had already opened the door and sailed in to