red about him in the aisle.

"Who did you say this was?" he demanded of Avery.

"I said his name was Nathan Dorne," Avery evaded.

"No, no!" Sinclair jerked out impatiently. "Isn't this--" He
hesitated, and finished in a voice suddenly lowered: "Isn't this Basil
Santoine?"

Avery, if he still wished to do so, found it impossible to deny.

"Basil Santoine!" Connery breathed.

To the conductor alone, among the four men standing by the berth, the
name seemed to have come with the sharp shock of a surprise; with it
had come an added sense of responsibility and horror over what had
happened to the passenger who had been confided to his care, which made
him whiten as he once more repeated the name to himself and stared down
at the man in the berth.

Conductor Connery knew Basil Santoine only in the way that Santoine was
known to great numbers of other people--that is, by name but not by
sight. There was, however, a reason why the circumstances of
Santoine's life had remained in the conductor's mind while he forgot or
had not heeded the same sort of facts in regard to men who traveled
much more often on trans-continental trains. Thus Connery, staring
whitely at the form in the berth, recalled for instance Santoine's age;
Santoine was fifty-one.

Basil Santoine at twenty-two had been graduated from Harvard, though
blind. His connections,--the family was of well-to-do Southern
stock,--his possession of enough money for his own support, made it
possible for him to live idly if he wished; but Santoine had not chosen
to make his blindness an excuse for doing this. He had disregarded too
the thought of foreign travel as being useless for a man who had no
eyes; and he had at once settled himself to his chosen profession,
which was law. He had not found it easy to get a start in this;
lawyers had shown no willingness to take into their offices a blind boy
to whom the surroundings were unfamiliar and to whom everything must be
read; and he had succeeded only after great effort in getting a place
with a small and unimportant firm. Within a short time, well within
two years, men had begun to recognize that in this struggling law-firm
there was a powerful, clear, compelling mind. Santoine, a youth living
in darkness, unable to see the men with whom he talked or the documents
and books which must be read to him, was beginning to put the stamp of
his personality on the firm's affairs. A year later, his name appeared
with