ook her hand and retaining it hardly the fraction of an instant,
let it go. Was it her friendship she had been offering him? Men use
badinage without respect to what their actual feelings may be;
women--some memory from the past in which he had known such girls as
this, seemed to recall--use it most frequently when their feelings,
consciously or unconsciously, are drawing toward a man.

Eaton now went into the men's compartment of his car, where he sat
smoking till after the train was under way again. The porter looked in
upon him there to ask if he wished his berth made up now; Eaton nodded
assent, and fifteen minutes later, dropping the cold end of his cigar
and going out into the car, he found the berth ready for him. "D.
S.'s" section, also made up but with the curtains folded back
displaying the bedding within, was unoccupied; jerkings of the
curtains, and voices and giggling in the two berths at the end of the
car, showed that Amy and Constance were getting into bed; the
Englishman was wide awake in plain determination not to go to bed until
his accustomed Nottingham hour. Eaton, drawing his curtains together
and buttoning them from the inside, undressed and went to bed. A
half-hour later the passage of some one through the aisle and the
sudden dimming of the crack of light which showed above the curtains
told him that the lights in the car had been turned down. Eaton closed
his eyes, but sleep was far from him.

Presently he began to feel the train beginning to labor with the
increasing grade and the deepening snow. It was well across the State
line and into Idaho; it was nearing the mountains, and the weather was
getting colder and the storm more severe. Eaton lifted the curtain
from the window beside him and leaned on one elbow to look out. The
train was running through a bleak, white desolation; no light and no
sign of habitation showed anywhere. Eaton lay staring out, and now the
bleak world about him seemed to assume toward him a cruel and merciless
aspect. The events of the day ran through his mind again with sinister
suggestion. He had taken that train for a certain definite, dangerous
purpose which required his remaining as obscure and as inconspicuous as
possible; yet already he had been singled out for attention. So far,
he was sure, he had received no more than that--attention, curiosity
concerning him. He had not suffered recognition; but that might come
at any moment. Could he risk l