all right, in two-three weeks." He was
now openly offensive, as with a sense of having Gaites in his power.

A locomotive-bell rang, and Gaites started toward the doorway. "Is that
my train?"

The man openly laughed. "Guess it is, if you're goin' to Lower Merritt."
As Gaites shot through the doorway toward his train, he added, in an
insolent drawl, "Miss--Des--mond!"

Gaites was so furious when he got back to the smoking-room of the
parlor-car that he was sorry for several miles that he had not turned
back and kicked the man, even if it lost him his train. But this was
only while he was under the impression that he was furious with the man.
When he discovered that he was furious with himself, for having been all
imaginable kinds of an ass, he perceived that he had done the wisest
thing he could in leaving the man to himself, and taking up the line of
his journey again. What remained mortifying was that he had bought his
ticket and checked his bag to Lower Merritt, which he wished never to
hear of again, much less see.

He rang for the porter and consulted him as to what could be done toward
changing the check on his bag from Lower Merritt to Middlemount
Junction; and as it appeared that this was quite feasible, since his
ticket would have carried him two stations beyond the Junction, he had
done it. He knew the hotel at Middlemount, and he decided to pass the
night there, and the next day to go back to Kent Harbor and June Alber,
and let Lower Merritt and Phyllis Desmond take care of themselves from
that time forward.

While the driver of the Middlemount House barge was helping the
station-master-and-baggage-man (they were one) put the arriving
passengers' trunks into the wagon for the Middlemount House, Gaites
paced up and down the long platform in the remnant of his excitement,
and vowed himself to have nothing more to do with Miss Desmond's piano,
even if it should turn up then and there and personally appeal to him
for help. In this humor he was not prepared to have anything of the kind
happen, and he stood aghast, in looking absently into a freight-car
standing on the track, to read, "Miss Phyllis Desmond, Lower Merritt, N.
H.," on the slope of the now familiar case just within the open doorway.
It was as if the poor girl were personally there pleading for his help
with the eyes whose tenderness he remembered.

The united station-master-and-baggage-man, who appeared also to be the
freight agent, came loungi