at all; and that she had brought her dinner
with her in a pasteboard shirt-box rather than trust railroad cooking,
being a dyspeptic. She submitted the empty box in evidence, got him to
step to the platform and throw it away, and on his return informed him
that it was dyspepsia had disabled her mouth, and not overwork, as she
and her sisters had once supposed.

Still March did finish his letter. Then he went and smoked another
cigar. And then he came again and found the four traveling men playing
whist, Mr. and Mrs. Fair dozing, and Miss Garnet looking out of a window
on the other side in a section at the far end of the car, the only one
not otherwise occupied.

"I'm in your seat," she said.

"O don't refuse to share it with me; you take away all its value."

She gradually remarked that she was not the sort of person wilfully to
damage the value of a seat in a railroad car, and they shared it.

For a time they talked at random. He got out a map and time-table and,
while he held one side and she the other, showed where they had had to
lie five hours at a junction the night before. But when these were
folded again there came a silent interval, and then John sank lower in
his place, dropped his tone, and asked,

"Do you remember what we were speaking of before dinner?"

Barbara dreamily said yes, and they began where they had left off.

Three hours later, on the contrary, they left off where they had begun.

LVII.

GO ON, SAYS BARBARA

Miss Garnet said she ought to rejoin her friends, and John started with
her.

On their way the dyspeptic stopped them affectionately to offer Barbara
a banana, and ask if she and the gentleman were not cousins. Miss Garnet
said no, and John enjoyed that way she had of smiling sweetly with her
eyes alone. But she smiled just as prettily with her lips also when the
woman asked him if he was perfectly sure he hadn't relations in Arkansas
named Pumpkinseed--he had such a strong Pumpkinseed look. The questioner
tried to urge the banana upon him, assuring him that it was the last of
three, which, she said, she wouldn't have bought if she hadn't been so
lonesome.

Barbara sat down with her, to John's disgust, a feeling which was not
diminished when he passed on to her Northern friends, and Mr. Fair tried
very gently to draw him out on the Negro question! When he saw Mrs. Fair
glancing about for the porter he sprang to find and send him, but
lingered, himself, long among the