e curtains. She
procured a telegraph blank and wrote a message to her mother, telling
her that she had gone north to join her father. When the train had
started, she gave the message to the porter, directing him to send it
from the first large town at which they stopped.

She left the light burning in its little niche at the head of the
berth; she had no expectation that she could sleep; shut in by the
green curtains, she drew the covers up about her and stared upward at
the paneled face of the berth overhead. Then new frightened distrust
of the man she had been about to marry flowed in upon her and became
all her thought.

She had not promised Uncle Benny that she would not marry Henry; her
promise had been that she would not engage herself to that marriage
until she had seen Uncle Benny again. Uncle Benny's own act--his
disappearance---had prevented her from seeing him; for that reason she
had broken her promise; and, from its breaking, something terrifying,
threatening to herself had come. She had been amazed at what she had
seen in Henry; but she was appreciating now that, strangely, in her
thought of him there was no sense of loss to herself. Her feeling of
loss, of something gone from her which could not be replaced, was for
Alan. She had had admiration for Henry, pride in him; had she mistaken
what was merely admiration for love? She had been about to marry him;
had it been only his difference from the other men she knew that had
made her do that? Unconsciously to herself, had she been growing to
love Alan?

Constance could not, as yet, place Henry's part in the strange
circumstances which had begun to reveal themselves with Alan's coming
to Chicago; but Henry's hope that Uncle Benny and Alan were dead was
beginning to make that clearer. She lay without voluntary movement in
her berth, but her bosom was shaking with the thoughts which came to
her.

Twenty years before, some dreadful event had altered Uncle Benny's
life; his wife had known--or had learned--enough of that event so that
she had left him. It had seemed to Constance and her father,
therefore, that it must have been some intimate and private event.
They had been confirmed in believing this, when Uncle Benny, in madness
or in fear, had gone away, leaving everything he possessed to Alan
Conrad. But Alan's probable relationship to Uncle Benny had not been
explanation; she saw now that it had even been misleading. For a
purely private ev