to be duennaed at such a time."

"It isn't a question of likes and--" but at that moment the truants
appeared to speak for themselves.

"It's chilly out there in the open car, and we came in to talk and get
warm," said Gertrude. "Did you get any pie, Mrs. Burton?"

"No; Mr. Burton wasn't as thoughtful as Fr--as Mr. Brockway."

"Mr. Brockway was twice thoughtful," laughed Gertrude, as the passenger
agent drew a pie from under his coat and proceeded to cut it into
quarters with his pocket-knife.

Burton said, "Oh, pshaw!" with deprecatory emphasis, but he accepted his
allotment and ate it with the others. Afterward, when the talk took
flight into the region of badinage, he went away and devoted himself
dutifully to the Tadmorians.

When he was gone, the trio made merry with true holiday zest. For
Gertrude, the little plunge into the stream of unconventionality was
refreshing and keenly exhilarating, and she bore her part joyously,
forgetting the day of reckoning, and seeking only to make the most of
the few hours of outlawry.

Brockway, too, drank of the cup of levity, but in his inmost parts he
stood amazed with sheer joy in the presence of the real Gertrude--of the
woman he loved divested of the mask of conventionality. He had loved her
well for what he thought she was, and had been content to set her upon a
pedestal to be worshipped from afar as the apotheosis of adorable
womanhood. But the light of this later revelation individualized her;
ideals and abstractions vanished before her living, breathing
personality, and Brockway was made to know that she could never again be
to him the mere archetype of lovable woman-kind. She was infinitely
more. She was the one woman in all the world whose life might be the
complement of his; the other half of the broken talisman; the major and
truer portion of a mystic circle of which his being was the other
segment.

All of which was doubtless very romantic and unmodern in a sensible
young man of Brockway's practical and workaday upbringing; but there are
more curious seeds lying dormant in the soil of human nature than the
analyst has ever yet classified; and ideality and romanticism are but
skin-masked in many a man whose outward presentment is merely the _abc_
of modern realism.

So Brockway beheld and rhapsodized in secret, and laughed and chatted
openly, and sank deeper and deeper in the pit of perplexity as the train
burrowed its way into the heart of the mountains.