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"no-man's-land" between the two frontier towns, and the German officials came on board. They too were very polite and correct, and presently the train moved off again on the next stage of the long journey.
    Kenneth, who was sitting opposite her, leaned over once to ask, quite solicitously, if she were getting tired. But Elinor shook her head emphatically.
    "No, it's lovely! I'm enjoying every bit of it."
    "The loveliest part will soon be beginning," he told her. "After we leave Cologne. See—you can already glimpse the spires of the cathedral."
    Elinor looked where he pointed, and in the distance, across the flat fields, she saw two beautiful, fretted spires pointing into the clear sky.
    "I thought somehow that the cathedral was destroyed."
    "No. A great deal of the rest of Cologne was. But though it was heavily blasted when so much of the nearby railway was destroyed, the actual fabric
     
    of the cathedral was preserved. You will have a better view presently."
    "And then—after Cologne—what next?" she asked eagerly, unable to hear too much of the joys which lay ahead.
    "On down the Rhine, through Bonn and Coblenz to Frankfurt, and for a great part of the way we follow the actual course of the Rhine. That's what I meant when I said the loveliest part of the journey was soon beginning."
    In a short while, Elinor found this all too true. Once they had left Cologne behind and were out in the country once more, she began to notice a great falling away of the ground on the left, as though a deep valley wound its way through the scene. Once she thought she caught a glimpse of water. And then, almost without warning, they drew suddenly nearer, until they were running alongside the depression—and there, stretching before them for miles and miles, were the wide, silvery, slowly undulating waters of the Rhine.
    Nothing could move Elinor from the window after that. Sometimes the ground was comparatively flat and they glided past enchanting riverside villages, with red-roofed houses and ancient church-towers and little landing stages for the many river craft. Sometimes the banks became very steep on either side, curiously and regularly marked out in lines which, Kenneth explained, were the bare poles of the vineyards, later to be covered with foliage. And sometimes great cliffs towered above them,or across the river from them, and at intervals they passed incredibly romantic-looking castles or ancient ruins which looked like something straight out of all the adventure stories she had read as a child.
    No one disturbed her as she gazed, enraptured, on the tremendous and ever-changing panorama. The Conneltons were both dozing, and Kenneth left her in peace to take her first long look at the greatest and
     
    most beautiful waterway of Western Europe.
    Only once did he interrupt her absorption, to point out the lovely wooded rock known as the Lorelei, and tell her briefly of the legend of the Lorelei who used to sit there, combing her hair and luring the unsuspecting traveller to his doom.
    Bonn and Coblenz had been left far behind, the shining waters of the Moselle had merged with those of the Rhine, the towers of Mainz lay behind them and Frankfurt not far ahead, and still Elinor was watching, when Sir Daniel roused himself and said it was time for lunch. And Elinor found that it was one o'clock and that she was ravenously hungry.
    In the dining car once more—now beginning to be known to Elinor as a "Speisewagen"—she was struck afresh by the variety of languages being spoken around her. She even began to pick out which was which.
    French was easy, because she had learned a good deal at school, and her small stock of German words enabled her to pick out similar sounds and identify the language. She thought she also detected some Italian—or it could have been Spanish. But as for the interesting-looking couple in the corner, she simply could not imagine what they were talking.
    The two intrigued her and she wished she could have