CHAPTER III.
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Ten years had passed away since the time of that wedding tour.
Ten years! It is a very long time in a life. It makes a young man middle-aged, and a middle-aged man old. It takes away the bloom of youth, and the ignorance of the most inexperienced; and yet what a little while it is!—no more than a day when you look back upon it. The train from Marseilles to Nice, which is called the rapide, goes every day, and most people one time or another have travelled by it.
One day last winter one of the passengers in this train, established very comfortably in the best corner of a sleeping carriage in which he had passed the night luxuriously, and from which he was now looking out upon the shining sea, the red rocks, the many bays and headlands of the coast, suddenly receive
