nk they are castanets as it is," I explained.
"But the lady--"

The young lady, however, declined and we went on together. Once, when
the trolley line was in sight, she got a pebble in her low shoe, and we
sat down under a tree until she found the cause of the trouble.

"I--I don't know what I should have done without you," I blundered.
"Moral support and--and all that. Do you know, my first conscious
thought after the wreck was of relief that you had not been hurt?"

She was sitting beside me, where a big chestnut tree shaded the road,
and I surprised a look of misery on her face that certainly my words had
not been meant to produce.

"And my first thought," she said slowly, "was regret that I--that I
hadn't been obliterated, blown out like a candle. Please don't look like
that! I am only talking."

But her lips were trembling, and because the little shams of society are
forgotten at times like this, I leaned over and patted her hand lightly,
where it rested on the grass beside me.

"You must not say those things," I expostulated. "Perhaps, after all,
your friends--"

"I had no friends on the train." Her voice was hard again, her tone
final. She drew her hand from under mine, not quickly, but decisively. A
car was in sight, coming toward us. The steel finger of civilization, of
propriety, of visiting cards and formal introductions was beckoning us
in. Miss West put on her shoe.

We said little on the car. The few passengers stared at us frankly, and
discussed the wreck, emphasizing its horrors. The girl did not seem to
hear. Once she turned to me with the quick, unexpected movement that was
one of her charms.

"I do not wish my mother to know I was in the accident," she said. "Will
you please not tell Richey about having met me?"

I gave my promise, of course. Again, when we were almost into Baltimore,
she asked to examine the gun-metal cigarette case, and sat silent with
it in her hands, while I told of the early morning's events on the
Ontario.

"So you see," I finished, "this grip, everything I have on, belongs to
a fellow named Sullivan. He probably left the train before the
wreck,--perhaps just after the murder."

"And so--you think he committed the--the crime?" Her eyes were on the
cigarette case.

"Naturally," I said. "A man doesn't jump off a Pullman car in the middle
of the night in another man's clothes, unless he is trying to get away
from something. Besides the dirk, there were the stains t