Two sections away the inevitable newly married pair posed unconsciously to point the moral for Miss Brentwood. She marked the eagerly antic.i.p.ative solicitude of the boyish groom, contrasting it now and then with Ormsby's less obtrusive attentions. It was all very absurd and sentimental, she thought; and yet she was not without a curious heart-stirring of envy provoked by the self-satisfied complacency of the bride.

What had that chit of a girl done to earn her immunity from self-defendings and the petty anxieties? Nothing, Elinor decided; at least, nothing more purposeful than the swimmer does when he lets himself drift with the current. None the less, the immunity was hers, undeniably, palpably. For the first time in her life Miss Brentwood found herself looking, with a little shudder of withdrawal and dismay, down the possible vista--possible to every unmarried woman of twenty-four--milestoned by unbroken years of spinsterhood and self-helpings.

Was she strong enough to walk this hedged-up path alone?--single-hearted enough to go on holding out against her mother's urgings, against Ormsby's masterful wooing, against her own unconquerable longing for a sure anchorage in some safe haven of manful care and supervision; all this that she might continue to preserve her independence and live the life which, despite its drawbacks, was yet her own?

There were times when she doubted her resolution; and this first night of the westward journey was one of them. She had thought at one time that she might be able to idealize David Kent, but he had gone his way to hew out his fortune, taking her upstirrings of his ambition in a purely literal and selfish sense, so far as she could determine. And now there was Brookes Ormsby. She could by no possibility idealize him. He was a fixed fact, stubbornly a.s.serted. Yet he was a great-hearted gentleman, unspoiled by his millions, thoughtful always for her comfort, generous, self-effacing. Just now, for example, when he had done all, he had seemed to divine her wish to be alone and had betaken himself to the smoking-compartment.

"I promised not to bore you," he had said, "and I sha'n't. Send the porter after me if there is anything I have forgotten to do."

She took up the magazine he had left on the seat beside her and sought to put away the disquieting thoughts. But they refused to be dismissed; and now among them rose up another, dating back to that idealizing summer at the foot of Old Croydon, and having its genesis in a hard saying of her mother's.

She closed her eyes, recalling the words and the occasion of them. "You are merely wasting time and sentiment on this young upstart of a country lawyer, Elinor. So long as you were content to make it a summer day's amus.e.m.e.nt, I had nothing to say; you are old enough and sensible enough to choose your own recreations. But in justice to yourself, no less than to him, you must let it end with our going home. You haven't money enough for two."

Her eyes grew hot under the closed lids when she remembered. At the time the hard saying was evoked there was money enough for two, if David Kent would have shared it. But he had held his peace and gone away, and now there was not enough for two.

Elinor faced her major weakness unflinchingly. She was not a slave to the luxuries--the luxuries of the very rich. On the contrary, she had tried to make herself believe that hardness was a part of her creed. But latterly, she had been made to see that there was a formidable array of things which she had been calling comforts: little luxuries which Brookes Ormsby's wife might reckon among the simplest necessities of the daily life, but which David Kent's wife might have to forego; nay, things which Elinor Brentwood might presently have to forego. For she compelled herself to front the fact of the diminished patrimony squarely. So long as the modest Western Pacific dividends were forthcoming, they could live comfortably and without pinching. But failing these----

"No, I'm not great enough," she confessed, with a little shiver. "I should be utterly miserable. If I could afford to indulge in ideals it would be different; but I can't--not when one word of mine will build a barrier so high that all the soul-killing little skimpings can never climb over it.

And besides, I owe something to mother and Nell."

It was the final straw. When any weakness of the human heart can find a seeming virtue to go hand in hand with it, the battle is as good as lost; and at that moment Brookes Ormsby, placidly refilling his short pipe in the smoking-room of the Pullman, was by no means in the hopeless case he was sometimes tempted to fancy himself.

As may be surmised, a diligent suitor, old enough to plan thoughtfully, and yet young enough to simulate the youthful ardor of a lover whose hair has not begun to thin at the temples, would lose no ground in a three days' journey and the opportunities it afforded.

In Penelope's phrase, Elinor "suffered him", enjoying her freedom from care like a sleepy kitten; shutting the door on the past and keeping it shut until the night when their through sleeper was coupled to the Western Pacific Flyer at A.& T. Junction. But late that evening, when she was rummaging in her hand-bag for a handkerchief, she came upon David Kent's letter and read it again.

"Loring tells me you are coming West," he wrote. "I a.s.sume there is at least one chance in three that you will pa.s.s through Gaston. If you do, and if the hour is not altogether impossible, I should like to meet your train. One thing among the many the past two years have denied me--the only thing I have cared much about, I think--is the sight of your face. I shall be very happy if you will let me look at you--just for the minute or two the train may stop."

There was more of it; a good bit more: but it was all guarded commonplace, opening no window in the heart of the man David Kent. Yet even in the commonplace she found some faint interlinings of the change in him; not a mere metamorphosis of the outward man, as a new environment might make, but a radical change, deep and biting, like the action of a strong acid upon a fine-grained metal.

She returned the letter to its envelope, and after looking up Gaston on the time-table fell into a heart-stirring reverie, with unseeing eyes fixed on the restful blackness of the night rushing rearward past the car windows.

"He has forgotten," she said, with a little lip-curl of disappointment.

"He thinks he ought to remember, and he is trying--trying because Grantham said something that made him think he ought to try. But it's no use. It was only a little summer idyl, and we have both outlived it."

She was still gazing steadfastly upon the wall of outer darkness when the porter began to make down the berths and Penelope came over to sit in the opposite seat. A moment later the younger sister made a discovery, or thought she did.

"Why, Elinor Brentwood!" she said. "I do believe you are crying!"

Elinor's smile was serenity undisturbed.

"What a vivid imagination you have, Nell, dear," she scoffed. Then she changed the subject arbitrarily: "Is mother quite comfortable? Did you have the porter put a screen in her window?--you know she always insists she can't breathe without it."

Penelope evaded the queries and took her turn at subject-wrenching--an art in which she excelled.

"We are on our own railroad now, aren't we?" she asked, with purposeful lack-interest. "And--let me see--isn't Mr. Kent at some little town we pa.s.s through?"

"It is a city," said Elinor. "And the name is Gaston."

"I remember now," Penelope rejoined. "I wonder if we shall see him?"

"It is most unlikely. He does not know we are coming, and he wouldn't be looking for us."

Penelope's fine eyes clouded. At times Elinor's thought-processes were as plain as print to the younger sister; at other times they were not.

"I should think the least we could do would be to let him know," she ventured. "Does anybody know what time the train pa.s.ses Gaston?"

"At seven-fifteen to-morrow evening," was the unguarded reply; and Penelope drew her own conclusions from the ready answer and the folded time-table in Elinor's lap.

"Well, why don't you send him a wire? I'm sure I should."

"Why should I?" said Elinor, warily.

"Oh, I don't know: any other young woman of his acquaintance would, I fancy. I have half a mind to do it myself. _I_ like him, if you don't care for him any more."

Thus Penelope; and a little while afterward, finding herself in the library compartment with blanks and pen and ink convenient and nothing better to do, she impulsively made the threat good in a ten-word message to Kent.

"If he should happen to drop in unexpectedly it will give Ellie the shock of her life," she mused; and the telegram was smuggled into the hands of the porter to be sent as occasion offered.

Those who knew Mr. Brookes Ormsby best were wont to say that the world of action, a world l.u.s.ting avidly for resourceful men, had lost the chance of acquiring a promising leader when he was born heir to the Ormsby millions.

Be that as it may, he made the most of such opportunities for the exercising of his gift as came to one for whom the long purse leveled most barriers; had been making the most of the present leaguer of a woman's heart--a citadel whose capitulation was not to be compa.s.sed by mere money-might, he would have said.

Up to the final day of the long westward flight all things had gone well with him. True, Elinor had not thawed visibly, but she had been tolerant; Penelope had amused herself at no one's expense save her own--a boon for which Ormsby did not fail to be duly thankful; and Mrs. Brentwood had contributed her mite by keeping hands off.

But at the dining-car luncheon on the last day's run, Penelope, languishing at a table for two with an unresponsive Ormsby for a vis-a-vis, made sly mention of the possible recrudescence of one David Kent at a place called Gaston: this merely to note the effect upon an unresponsive table-mate.

In Penelope's observings there was no effect perceptible. Ormsby said "Ah?" and asked if she would have more of the salad. But later, in a contemplative half-hour with his pipe in the smoking-compartment, he let the sc.r.a.p of information sink in and take root.

Hitherto Kent had been little more than a name to him; a name he had never heard on Elinor's lips. But if love be blind in the teens and twenties, it is more than apt to have a keen gift of insight in the thirties and beyond. Hence, by the time Ormsby had come to the second filling of his pipe, he had pieced together bits of half-forgotten gossip about the Croydon summer, curious little reticences on Elinor's part, vague hints let fall by Mrs. Brentwood; enough to enable him to chart the rock on which his love-argosy was drifting, and to name it--David Kent.

Now to a well-knit man of the world--who happens to be a heaven-born diplomatist into the bargain--to be forewarned is to be doubly armed. At the end of the half-hour of studious solitude in the smoking-room, Ormsby had p.r.i.c.ked out his course on the chart to a boat's-length; had trimmed his sails to the minutest starting of a sheet. A glance at his watch and another at the time-table gave him the length of his respite. Six hours there were; and a dining-car dinner intervened. Those six hours, and the dinner, he decided, must win or lose the race.

Picturing for ourselves, if we may, how nine men out of ten would have given place to panic-ardor, turning a possible victory into a hopeless rout, let us hold aloof and mark the generalship of the tenth, who chances to be the heaven-born.

For five of the six precious hours Ormsby merely saw to it that Elinor was judiciously marooned. Then the dining-car was reopened and the evening meal was announced. Waiting until a sufficient number of pa.s.sengers had gone forward to insure a crowded car, Ormsby let his party fall in with the tail of the procession, and the inevitable happened. Single seats only could be had, and Elinor was compelled to dine in solemn silence at a table with three strangers.

Dinner over, there remained but twenty minutes of the respite; but the diplomatist kept his head, going back to the sleeping-car with his charges and dropping into the seat beside Elinor with the light of calm a.s.surance in his eye.

"You are quite comfortable?" he began. "Sha'n't I have the Presence in the buffet make you a cup of tea? That in the diner didn't deserve the name."

She was regarding him with curious anger in the gray eyes, and her reply quite ignored the kindly offer of refreshment.

"You are the pink of dragomans," she said. "Don't you want to go and smoke?"

"To be entirely consistent, I suppose I ought to," he confessed, wondering if his throw had failed. "Do you want me to go?"