to her father, when
they came back from the late dining-car breakfast. "You ought to do
something about it." Miss Margery was at the moment fresh from "Florida
Specials" and the solid-Pullman vestibuled luxuries of eastern winter
travel.

Jasper Grierson's smile was a capitalistic acquirement, and some of his
fellow-townsmen described it as "cast-iron." But for his daughter it was
always indulgent.

"I don't own the railroad yet, Madgie; you'll have to give me a little
more time," he pleaded, clipping the tip from a black cigar of heroic
proportions and reaching for the box of safety matches.

"I'll begin now, if you are going to smoke that dreadful thing in this
stuffy little den," was the unfilial retort; and the daughter found a
magazine and exchanged the drawing-room with its threat of asphyxiation
for a seat in the body of the car.

For a little while the magazine, or rather the pictures in it, sufficed
for a time-killer. Farther along, the panorama of eastern Iowa unrolling
itself beside the path of the train served as an alternative to the
pictured pages. When both the book and the out-door prospect palled upon
her, Miss Margery tried to interest herself in her immediate
surroundings.

The material was not promising. Two old ladies dozing in the section
diagonally across the aisle, four school-girls munching chocolates and
restlessly shifting from seat to seat in the farther half of the car,
and the conductor methodically making out his reports in the section
opposite, summed up the human interest, or at least the visible part of
it. Half-way down the car one of the sections was still curtained and
bulkheaded; and when Miss Grierson curled up in her seat and closed her
eyes she was wondering vaguely why the porter had left this one section
undisturbed in the morning scene-shifting.

The northward-flying train was crossing a river, and the dining-car
waiter was crying the luncheon summons, when Margery awoke to realize
the comforting fact that she had successfully slept the forenoon away.
With the eye-opening came a recurrence of the last-remembered waking
thought--the wonder why the curtained section was still undisturbed.
When she was leaving the _Anita_ with her father, the explanation
suggested itself: of course, the occupant of the middle section must be
ill.

Luncheon over, there was nothing to remind her of the probable invalid
in Number Six until late in the afternoon when, looking through the ope