Strangers on a train ....

I was traveling up north from London on the East Coast Mainline. There was a young woman sitting opposite me and we had got chatting. She was a student, and just before our journey was about to end, I asked her if, since my car was in the station's car park, I could drop her off anywhere conveniently. She explained that she was changing to another local train and her father was collecting her at the end of that second train journey, but she told me that she had been born and brought up somwhere in the middle of my route. It proved to be the house in the countryside that I had just only recently purchased. She described the exact position of what had been her bedroom. It was the room I intended to use as my study. She told me of a mini but potentially great disaster that had occurred in that room when she was a child. She had, without noticing, knocked over a radiant-type electric fire which had quietly burnt its way face-down through the linoleum. No one was hurt but the memory persisted. The following morning, intending anyway to sand the floorboards, I lifted the existing linoleum and there, carefully disguised by an underlay of sorts, was a shallow, blackened, crater of charred floorboards. Time stood still.