th, she wondered, who not once had so much as
stolen a look at the sweet, bonny face of her maiden sister? Surely
'twas a face any man would love to gaze upon,--so fair, so exquisite in
contour and feature, so pearly in complexion, so lovely in the deep,
dark brown of its shaded eyes.

The bold glances of the four card-players she had defiantly returned,
and vanquished. Those men, like the travelling gents, were creatures of
coarser mould; but her experienced eye told her the solitary occupant of
the opposite section was a gentleman. The clear cut of his pale
features, the white, slender hand and shapely foot, the style and finish
of his quiet travelling-dress, the soft modulation and refined tone of
his voice on the one occasion when she heard him reply to some
importunity of the train-boy with his endless round of equally
questionable figs and fiction, the book he was reading,--a volume of
Emerson,--all combined to speak of a culture and position equal to her
own. She had been over the trans-continental railways often enough to
know that it was permissible for gentlemen to render their
fellow-passengers some slight attention which would lead to mutual
introductions if desirable; and this man refused to see that the
opportunity was open to him.

True, when first she took her survey of those who were to be her
fellow-travellers at the "transfer" on the Missouri, she decided that
here was one against whom it would be necessary to guard the approaches.
She had good and sufficient reasons for wanting no young man as
attractive in appearance as this one making himself interesting to
pretty Nellie on their journey. She had already decided what Nellie's
future was to be. Never, indeed, would she have taken her to the gay
frontier station whither she was now _en route_, had not that future
been already settled to her satisfaction. Nellie Travers, barely out of
school, was betrothed, and willingly so, to the man she, her devoted
elder sister, had especially chosen. Rare and most unlikely of
conditions! she had apparently fallen in love with the man picked out
for her by somebody else. She was engaged to Mrs. Rayner's fascinating
friend Mr. Steven Van Antwerp, a scion of an old and esteemed and
wealthy family; and Mr. Van Antwerp, who had been educated abroad, and
had a Heidelberg scar on his left cheek, and dark, lustrous eyes, and
wavy hair,--almost raven,--was a devoted lover, though fully fifteen
years Miss Nellie's senior