ways worn it from the day
of his mother's death till an hour ago.

Then he stood up, and turned deliberately away.

There came the loud wailing whistle which told that the train was
nearing a station. He leaned out of the window; the lights of a town
were flashing past, and he grimly told himself that there was no time to
lose.

Vanderlyn again bent down; the instinctive repugnance of the living for
the dead suddenly left him. His darling little Peggy! How could he bear
to leave her there--alone? If he and she had been what they ought to
have been--husband and wife--even then, he felt that never would he have
left her to the neglect, to the forgetfulness to which other men leave
their beloved dead. There rose before him the memory of one of the most
moving of the world's great pictures, Goya's painting of mad Queen Joan
bearing about with her the unburied body of Philip.

He turned that which had been Margaret Pargeter so that her face would
be completely hidden from anyone opening the door and looking into the
carriage.

Yet, even as he was doing this, Vanderlyn kept a sharp watch and ward
over his own nerves. His had now become the mental attitude of a man who
desires to save the living woman whom he loves from some great physical
danger. Blessing his own foresight in providing the large rug which he
had folded about her so tenderly an hour ago, he pulled up a fold of it
till it covered, and completely concealed, her head. Should a traveller
now enter the carriage he would see nothing but a woman apparently
plunged in deep slumber.

Again Vanderlyn glanced, with far more scrutinising eyes than he had
done when first entering the train, through the two glazed apertures
which commanded a view of the next carriage; it was, as he knew well,
empty.

He turned once more the silk shade over the lamp, jammed his hat down
over his eyes, set his lips together, and, averting his eyes from what
he was leaving, opened the railway carriage door....

The train was slowing down; a few hundred yards ahead lay the station.
Vanderlyn stepped to one side of the footboard, and waited till the door
through which he had just passed swung to; then he turned the handle,
securing it firmly.

With soft, swift steps, he walked past the window of the now darkened
carriage and slipped into the next empty, brightly-lighted compartment.
There came over him a strong temptation to look through the little
apertures giving into the darkened