ions, is to take a bitter pill with an
asafoetida coating.

In the limp and demoralized condition in which he was left the only
clear sentiment in his mind was that he did not want to meet her again
just at present. So he sat for an hour or more longer out on the
platform, and had become as thoroughly chilled without as he was within
when at dusk the train stopped at a little three-house station for
supper. Then he went into one of the forward day-cars, not intending to
return to the sleeping-car till Miss Dwyer should have retired. When the
train reached Ogden the next morning; instead of going on East he would
take the same train back to San Francisco, and that would be the end of
his romance. His engagement in New York had been a myth, and with Miss
Dwyer's "No, sir," the only business with the East that had brought him
on this trip was at an end.

About an hour after leaving the supper-station the train suddenly
stopped in the midst of the desert. Something about the engine had
become disarranged which it would take some time to put right. Glad to
improve an opportunity to stretch their legs, many of the passengers
left the cars and were strolling about, curiously examining the
sagebrush and the alkali, and admiring the ghostly plain as it spread,
bare, level and white as an ice-bound polar sea, to the feet of the
far-off mountains.

Lombard had also left the car, and was walking about, his hands in his
overcoat pockets, trying to clear his mind of the wreckage that
obstructed its working; for Miss Dwyer's refusal had come upon him as a
sudden squall that carries away the masts and sails of a vessel and
transforms it in a moment from a gallant bounding ship to a mere hulk
drifting in an entangled mass of debris. Of course she had a perfect
right to suit herself about the kind of a man she took for a husband,
but he certainly had not thought she was such an utter coquette. If ever
a woman gave a man reason to think himself as good as engaged, she had
given him that reason, and yet she refused him as coolly as she would
have declined a second plate of soup. There must be some truth, after
all, in the rant of the poets about the heartlessness and fickleness of
women, although he had always been used to consider it the merest bosh.
Suddenly he heard the train moving. He was perhaps fifty yards off, and,
grumbling anathemas at the stupidity of the conductor, started to run
for the last car. He was not quite desperate