porter tentatively.

"We're late twenty-fi'e minutes," he reassured her, with the hopeless
patience of one who has lost heart in curbing travellers' enthusiasms.

She turned towards the window a pair of shoulders plainly significant of
the burdensome last straw.

"Four days and nights in this train"--they were slower in those days--"and
now this extra twenty-five minutes!"

Miss Carmichael's famous dimple hid itself in disgust. The demure lines of
mouth and chin, that could always be relied upon for special pleading when
sentence was about to be passed on the dimple by those who disapproved of
dimples, drooped with disappointment. But the light-brown hair continued
to curl facetiously--it was the sort of hair whose spontaneous rippling
conveys to the seeing eye a sense of humor.

The train plodded across the spacious vacancy that unrolled itself farther
and farther in quest of the fugitive horizon. The scrap of view that came
within a closer range of vision spun past the car windows like a bit of
stage mechanism, a gigantic panorama rotating to simulate a race at
breakneck speed. But Miss Carmichael looked with unseeing eyes; the
whirling prairie with its golden flecks of cactus bloom was but part of
the universal strangeness, and the dull ache of homesickness was in it
all.

"My dear! my dear!"--a head in crimpers was thrust from between the
curtains of the section opposite--"I've been awake half the night. I was so
afraid I wouldn't see you before you got off."

The head was followed, almost instinctively, by a hand travelling
furtively to the crimpers that gripped the lady's brow like barnacles
clinging to a keel.

Mary expressed a grieved appreciation at the loss of rest in behalf of her
early departure, and conspicuously forbore to glance in the direction of
the barnacles, that being a first principle as between woman and woman.

"And, oh, my dear, it gets worse and worse. I've looked at it this
morning, and it's worse in Wyoming than it was in Colorado. What it 'll be
before I reach California, I shudder to think."

"It's bound to improve," suggested Mary, with the easy optimism of one who
was leaving it. "It couldn't be any worse than this, could it?"

The neuter pronoun, it might be well to state, signified the prairie; its
melancholy personality having penetrated the very marrow of their train
existence, they had come to refer to it by the monosyllable, as in certain
nether circles the head of the h