On a Side-Track

I

It was the second week in February, but winter had taken a fresh hold: the stockmen were grumbling; freight was dull, and travel light on the white Northwestern lines. In the Portland car from Omaha there were but four passengers: father and daughter,—a gentle, unsophisticated pair,—and two strong-faced men, fellow-travelers also, keeping each other’s company in a silent but close and conspicuous proximity. They shared the same section, the younger man sleeping above, going to bed before, and rising later than, his companion; and whenever he changed his seat or made an unexpected movement, the eyes of the elder man followed him, and they were never far from him at any time.

The elder was a plain farmer type of man, with a clean-shaven, straight upper lip, a grizzled beard covering the lower half of his face, and humorous wrinkles spreading from the corners of his keen gray eyes.

The younger showed in his striking person that union of good blood with hard conditions so often seen in the old-young graduates of the life schools of the West. His hands and face were dark with exposure to the sun, not of parks and club-grounds and seaside piazzas, but the dry untempered light of the desert and the plains. His dark eye was distinctively masculine,—if there be such a thing as gender in features,—bold, ardent, and possessive; but now it was clouded with sadness that did not pass like a mood, though he looked capable of moods.

He was dressed in the demi-toilet which answers for dinners in the West, on occasions where a dress-coat is not required. In itself the costume was correct, even fastidious, in its details, but on board an overland train there was a foppish unsuitability in it that “gave the wearer away,” as another man would have said—put him at a disadvantage, notwithstanding his splendid physique, and the sad, rather fine preoccupation of his manner. He looked like a very real person dressed for a trifling part, which he lays aside between the scenes while he thinks about his sick child, or his debts, or his friend with whom he has quarreled.

But these incongruities, especially the one of dress, might easily have escaped a pair of eyes so confiding and unworldly as those of the young girl in the opposite section; they had escaped her, but not the incongruity of youth with so much sadness. The girl and her father had boarded the car at Omaha, escorted by the porter of one of the forward sleepers on the same train. They had come from farther East. The old gentleman appeared to be an invalid; but they gave little trouble. The porter had much leisure on his hands, which he bestowed in arrears of sleep on the end seat forward. The conductor made up his accounts in the empty drawing-room, or looked at himself in the mirrors, or stretched his legs on the velvet sofas. He was a young fellow, with a tendency to jokes and snatches of song and talk of a light character when not on duty. He talked sometimes with the porter in low tones, and then both looked at the pair of travelers in No. 8, and the younger man seemed moodily aware of their observation.

On the first morning out from Omaha the old gentleman kept his berth until nine or ten o’clock. At eight his daughter brought him a cup of chocolate and a sandwich, and sat between his curtains, chatting with him cozily. In speaking together they used the language of the Society of Friends.

The young man opposite listened attentively to the girl’s voice; it was as sweet as the piping of birds at daybreak. Phebe her father called her.

Afterward Phebe sat in the empty section next her father’s. The table before her was spread with a fresh napkin, and a few pieces of old household silver and china which she had taken from her lunch-basket.

She and her father were economical travelers, but in all their belongings there was the refinement of modest suitability and an exquisite cleanliness. Her own order for breakfast was confined to a cup of coffee, which the porter was preparing in the buffet-kitchen.

“Would you mind changing places with me?”

The young man in No. 8 spoke to his companion, who sat opposite reading a newspaper. They changed seats, and by this arrangement the younger could look at Phebe, who innocently gave him every advantage to study her sober and delicate profile against the white snow-light, as she sat watching the dreary cattle-ranges of Wyoming swim past the car window.

Her hair had been brushed, and her face washed in the bitter alkaline waters of the plains, with the uncompromising severity of one whose standards of personal adornment are limited to the sternest ideals of neatness and purity. Yet her fair face bloomed, like a winter sunrise, with tints of rose and pearl and sapphire blue, and the pale gold of winter sunshine was in her satin-smooth hair.

The young man did not fail to include in his study of Phebe the modest breakfast equipment set out before her. He perfectly recalled the pattern of the white-and-gold china, the touch, the very taste, of the thin, bright old silver spoons; they were like his grandmother’s tea-things in the family homestead in the country, where he had spent his summers as a boy. The look of them touched him nearly, but not happily, it would seem, from his expression.

The porter came with the cup of coffee, and offered a number of patronizing suggestions in the line of his service, which the young girl declined. She set forth a meek choice of food, blushing faintly in deprecation of the young man’s eyes, of which she began to be aware. Evidently she was not yet hardened to the practice of eating in public.

He took the hint, and retired to his corner, opening a newspaper between himself and Phebe.

Presently he heard her call the porter in a small, ineffectual voice. The porter did not come. She waited a little, and called again, with no better result. He put down his newspaper.

“If you will press the button at your left,” he suggested.

“The button!” she repeated, looking at him helplessly.

He sprang to assist her. As he did so his companion flung down his paper, and jumped in front of him. The eyes of the two met. A hot flush rose to the young man’s eyebrows.

“I am calling the porter for her.”

“Oh!” said the other, and he sat down again; but he kept an eye upon the angry youth, who leaned across Phebe’s seat, and touched the electric button.

“Little girl hadn’t got on to it, eh?” the grizzled man remarked pleasantly, when his companion had resumed his seat.

There was no answer.

“Nice folks; from the country, somewheres back East, I should guess,” the imperturbable one continued. “Old man seems sort of sickly. Making a move on account of his health, likely. Great mistake—old folks turning out in winter huntin’ a climate.”

The young man remained silent, and the elder returned to his paper.

At Cheyenne, where the train halts for dinner, the young girl helped her father into his outer garments, buttoned herself hastily into her homespun jacket bordered with gray fur, pinned her little hat firmly to her crown of golden braids, hid her hands in her muff,—she did not wait to put on gloves,—and led the way to the dining-room.

The travelers in No. 8 disposed of their meal rapidly, in their usual close but silent conjunction, and returned at once to the car.

The old gentleman and his daughter walked the windy platform, and cast rather forlorn glances at the crowd bustling about in the bleak winter sunlight. When they took their seats again, the father’s pale blue eyes were still paler, his face looked white and drawn with the cold; but Phebe was like a rose: with her wonderful, pure color the girl was beautiful. The young man of No. 8 looked at her with a startled reluctance, as if her sweetness wounded him.

Then he seemed to have resolved to look at her no more. He leaned his head back in his corner, and closed his eyes; the train shook him slightly as he sat in moody preoccupation with his thoughts, and the miles of track flew by.

At Green River, at midnight, the Portland car was dropped by its convoy of the Union Pacific, and was coupled with a train making up for the Oregon Short Line. There was hooting and backing of engines, slamming of car doors, flashing of conductors’ lanterns, voices calling across the tracks. One of these voices could be heard, in the wakeful silence within the car, as an engine from the west steamed past in the glare of its snow-wreathed headlight.

“No. 10 stuck this side of Squaw Creek. Bet you don’t make it before Sunday!”

The outbound conductor’s retort was lost in the clank of couplings as the train lurched forward on the slippery rails.

“Phebe, is thee awake?” the old gentleman softly called to his daughter, about the small hours.

“Yes, father. Want anything?”

“Are those ventilators shut? I feel a cold draft in the back of my berth.”

The ventilators were all shut, but the train was now climbing the Wind River divide, the cold bitterly increasing, and the wind dead ahead. Cinders tinkled on the roaring stovepipes, the blast swept the car roofs, pelting the window panes with fine, dry snow, and searching every joint and crevice defended by the company’s upholstery.

Phebe slipped down behind the berth-curtain, and tucked a shawl in at her father’s back. Her low voice could be heard, and the old man’s self-pitying tones in answer to her tender questionings. He coughed at intervals till daybreak, when there was silence in section No. 7.

In No. 8, across the aisle, the young man lay awake in the strength of his thoughts, and made up passionate sentences which he fancied himself speaking to persons he might never be brought face to face with again. They were people mixed in with his life in various relations, past and present, whose opinions had weighed with him. When he heard Phebe talking to her father, he muttered, with a sort of anguish:—

“Oh, you precious lamb!”

He and his companion made their toilet early, and breakfasted and smoked together, and their taciturn relation continued as before. Snow filled the air, and blotted out the distance, but there were few stationary dark objects outside by which to gauge its fall. They were across the border now, between Wyoming and Idaho, in a featureless white region, a country of small Mormon ranches, far from any considerable town.

The old man slept behind his curtains. Phebe went through the morning routine by which women travelers make themselves at home and pass the time, but obviously her day did not begin until her father had reported himself. She had found a hole in one of her gloves, which she was mending, choosing critically the needle and the silk for the purpose from a very complete housewife in brown linen bound with a brown silk galloon. Again the young man was reminded of his boyhood, and of certain kind old ladies of precise habits who had contributed to his happiness, and occasionally had eked out the fond measure of paternal discipline.

The snow continued; about noon the train halted at a small water station, waited awhile as if in consideration of difficulties ahead, and then quietly backed down upon a side-track. A shock of silence followed. Every least personal movement in the thinly peopled car, before lost in the drumming of the wheels, asserted itself against this new medium. The passengers looked up and at one another; the Pullman conductor stepped out to make inquiries.

The silence continued, and became embarrassing. Phebe dropped her scissors. This time the young man sat still, but the flush rose to his forehead as before. The old gentleman’s breathing could be heard behind his curtains; the porter rattling plates in the cooking-closet; the soft rustling of the snow outside. Phebe stepped to her father’s berth, and peeped between his curtains; he was still sleeping. Her voice was hushed to the note of a sick-room as she asked,—

“Where are we now, do you know?”

The young man was looking at her, and to him she addressed the question.

With a glance at his companion, he crossed to her side of the car, and took the seat in front of her.

“We are in the Bear Lake valley, just over the border of Idaho, about fifteen miles from the Squaw Creek divide,” he answered, sinking his voice.

“Did you hear what that person said in the night, when a train passed us, about our not getting through?”

“I wondered if you heard that.” He smiled. “You did not rest well, I’m afraid.”

“I was anxious about father. This weather is a great surprise to us. We were told the winters were short in southern Idaho—almost like Virginia; but look at this!”

“We have nearly eight thousand feet of altitude here, you must remember. In the valleys it is warmer. There the winter does break usually about this time. Are you going on much farther?”

“To a place called Volney.”

“Volney is pretty high; but there is Boise, farther down. Strangers moving into a new country very seldom strike it right the first time.”

“Oh, we shall stay at Volney, even if we do not like it; that is, if we can stay. I have a married sister living there. She thought the climate would be better for father.”

After a pause she asked, “Do you know why we are stopping here so long?”

“Probably because we have had orders not to go any farther.”

“Do you mean that we are blocked?”

“The train ahead of us is. We shall stay here until that gets through.”

“You seem very cheerful about it,” she said, observing his expression.

“Ah, I should think so!”

His short lip curled in the first smile she had seen upon his strong, brooding face. She could not help smiling in response, but she felt bound to protest against his irresponsible view of the situation.

“Have you so much time to spend upon the road? I thought the men of this country were always in a hurry.”

“It makes a difference where a man is going, and on what errand, and what fortune he meets with on the way. I am not going to Volney.”

She did not understand his emphasis, nor the bearing of his words. His eyes dropped to her hands lying in her lap, still holding the glove she had been mending.

“How nicely you do it! How can you take such little stitches without pricking yourself, when the train is going?”

“It is my business to take little stitches. I don’t know how to do anything else.”

“Do you mean it literally? It is your business to sew?”

The notion seemed to surprise him.

“No; I mean in a general sense. Some of us can do only small things, a stitch at a time,—take little steps, and not know always where they are going.”

“Is this a little step—to Volney?”

“Oh, no; it is a very long one, and rather a wild one, I’m afraid. I suppose everybody does a wild thing once in a lifetime?”

“How should you know that?”

“I only said so. I don’t say that it is true.”

“People who take little steps are sometimes picked up and carried off their feet by those who take long, wild ones.”

“Why, what are we talking about?” she asked herself, in surprise.

“About going to Volney, was it not?” he suggested.

“What is there about Volney, please tell me, that you harp upon the name? I am a stranger, you know; I don’t know the country allusions. Is there anything peculiar about Volney?”

“She is a deep little innocent,” he said within himself; “but oh, so innocent!” And again he appeared to gather himself in pained resistance to some thought that jarred with the thought of Phebe. He rose and bowed, and so took leave of her, and settled himself back into his corner, shading his eyes with his hand.

He ate no luncheon, Phebe noticed, and he sat so long in a dogged silence that she began to cast wistful glances across the aisle, wondering if he were ill, or if she had unwittingly been rude to him. Any one could have shaken her confidence in her own behavior; moreover, she reminded herself, she did not know the etiquette of an overland train. She had heard that the Western people were very friendly; no doubt they expected a frank response in others. She resolved to be more careful the next time, if the moody young man should speak to her again.

Her father was awake now, dressed and sitting up. He was very chipper, but Phebe knew that his color was not natural, nor his breathing right. He was much inclined to talk, in a rambling, childish, excited manner that increased her anxiety.

The young man in No. 8 had evidently taken his fancy; his formal, old-fashioned advances were modestly but promptly met.

“I suppose it is not usual, in these parts, for travelers to inquire each other’s names?” the old gentleman remarked to his new acquaintance; “but we seem to have plenty of time on our hands; we might as well improve it socially. My name is David Underhill, and this is my daughter Phebe. Now what might thy name be, friend?”

“My name is Ludovic,” said the youth, looking a half-apology at Phebe, who saw no reason for it.

“First or family name?”

“Ludovic is my family name.”

“And a very good name it is,” said the old gentleman. “Not a common name in these parts, I should say, but one very well and highly known to me,” he added, with pleased emphasis. “Phebe, thee remembers a visit we had from Martin Ludovic when we were living at New Rochelle?”

“Thee knows I was not born when you lived at New Rochelle, father dear.”

“True, true! It was thy mother I was thinking of. She had a great esteem for Martin Ludovic. He was one of the world’s people, as we say—in the world, but not of the world. Yet he made a great success in life. He was her father’s junior partner—rose from a clerk’s stool in his counting-room; and a great success he made of it. But that was after Friend Lawrence’s time. My wife was Phebe Lawrence.”

Young Ludovic smiled brightly in reply to this information, and seemed about to speak, but the old gentleman forestalled him.

“Friend Lawrence had made what was considered a competence in those days—a very small one it would be called now; but he was satisfied. Thee may not be aware that it is a recommendation among the Friends, and it used to be a common practice, that when a merchant had made a sufficiency for himself and those depending on him, he should show his sense of the favor of Providence by stepping out and leaving his chance to the younger men. Friend Lawrence did so—not to his own benefit ultimately, though that was no one’s fault that ever I heard; and Martin Ludovic was his successor, and a great and honorable business was the outcome of his efforts. Now does thee happen to recall if Martin is a name in thy branch?”

“My grandfather was Martin Ludovic of the old New York house of Lawrence and Ludovic,” said the cadet of that name; but as he gave these credentials a profound melancholy subdued his just and natural pride.

“Is it possible!” Friend Underhill exulted, more pleased than if he had recovered a lost bank-note for many hundreds. There are no people who hold by the ties of blood and family more strongly than the Friends; and Friend Underhill, on this long journey, had felt himself sadly insolvent in those sureties that cannot be packed in a trunk or invested in irrigable lands. It was as if on the wild, cold seas he had crossed the path of a bark from home. He yearned to have speech with this graciously favored young man, whose grandfather had been his Phebe’s grandfather’s partner and dearest friend. The memory of that connection had been cherished with ungrudging pride through the succeeding generations in which the Ludovics had gone up in the world and the Lawrences had come down. Friend Underhill did not recall—nor would he have thought it of the least importance—that a Lawrence had been the benefactor in the first place, and had set Martin Ludovic’s feet upon the ladder of success. He took the young man’s hand affectionately in his own, and studied the favor of his countenance.

“Thee has the family look,” he said in a satisfied tone; “and they had no cause, as a rule, to be discontented with their looks.”

Young Ludovic’s eyes fell, and he blushed like a girl; the dark-red blood dyed his face with the color almost of shame. Phebe moved uneasily in her seat.

“Make room beside thee, Phebe,” said her father; “or, no, friend Ludovic; sit thee here beside me. If the train should start, I could hear thee better. And thy name—let me see—thee must be a Charles Ludovic. In thy family there was always a Martin, and then an Aloys, and then a Charles; and it was said—though a foolish superstition, no doubt—that the king’s name brought ill luck. The Ludovic whose turn it was to bear the name of the unhappy Stuart took with it the misfortunes of three generations.”

“A very unjust superstition I should call it,” pronounced Phebe.

“Surely, and a very idle one,” her father acquiesced, smiling at her warmth. “I trust, friend Charles, it has been given thee happily to disprove it in thy own person.”

“On the contrary,” said Charles Ludovic, “if I am not the unluckiest of my name, I hope there may never be another.”

He spoke with such conviction, such energy of sadness, only silence could follow the words. Then the old gentleman said, most gently and ruefully:—

“If it be indeed as thee says, I trust it will not seem an intrusion, in one who knew thy family’s great worth, to ask the nature of thy trouble—if by chance it might be my privilege to assist thee. I feel of rather less than my usual small importance—cast loose, as it were, between the old and the new; but if my small remedies should happen to suit with thy complaint, it would not matter that they were trifling—like Phebe’s drops and pellets she puts such faith in,” he added, with a glance at his daughter’s downcast face.

“Dear sir, you have helped me, by the gift of the outstretched hand. Between strangers, as we are, that implies a faith as generous as it is rare.”

“Nay, we are not strangers; no one of thy name shall call himself stranger to one of ours. Shall he, Phebe? Still, I would not importune thee”—

“I thank you far more than you can know; but we need not talk of my troubles. It was a graceless speech of mine to obtrude them.”

“As thee will. But I deny the lack of grace. The gracelessness was mine to bring up a foolish saying, more honored in the forgetting.”

Here Phebe interposed with a spoonful of the medicine her father had referred to so disparagingly. “I would not talk any more now, if I were thee, father. Thee sees how it makes thee cough.”

At this, Ludovic rose to leave them; but Phebe detained him, shyly doing the honors of their quarters in the common caravan. He stayed, but a constrained silence had come upon him. The old gentleman closed his eyes, and sometimes smiled to himself as he sat so, beside the younger man, and Phebe had strange thoughts as she looked at them both. Her imagination was greatly stirred. She talked easily and with perfect unconsciousness to Ludovic, and told him little things she could remember having heard about the one generation of his family that had formerly been connected with her own. She knew more about it, it appeared, than he did. And more and more he seemed to lose himself in her eyes, rather than to be listening to her voice. He sat with his back to his companion across the aisle; at length the latter rose, and touched him on the shoulder. He turned instantly, and Phebe, looking up, caught the hard, roused expression that altered him into the likeness of another man.

“I am going outside.” No more was said, but Ludovic rose, bowed to Phebe, and followed his curt fellow-passenger.

“What can be the connection between them?” thought the girl. “They seem inseparable, yet not friends precisely. How could they be friends?” And in her prompt mental comparison the elder man inevitably suffered. She began to think of all the tragedies with which young lives are fatalistically bound up; but it was significant that none of her speculations included the possibility of anything in the nature of error in respect to this Charles Ludovic who called himself unhappy.

II

“Stop a moment. I want to speak to you,” said Ludovic. The two men were passing through the gentlemen’s toilet-room; Ludovic turned his back to the marble washstand, and waited, with his head up, and the tips of his long hands resting in his trousers’ pockets. “I have a favor to ask of you, Mr. Burke.”

“Well, sir, what’s the size of it?”

“You must have heard some of our talk in there; you see how it is? They will never, of themselves, suspect the reason of your fondness for my company. Is it worth while, for the time we shall be together, to put them on to it? It’s not very easy, you see; make it as easy as you can.”

“Have I tried to make it hard, Mr. Ludovic?”

“Not at all. I don’t mean that.”

“Am I giving you away most of the time?”

“Of course not. You have been most awfully good. But you’re—you’re damnably in my way. I see you out of the corner of my eye always, when you aren’t square in front of me. I can’t make a move but you jump. Do you think I am such a fool as to make a break now? No, sir; I am going through with this; I’m in it most of the time. Now see here, I give you my word—and there are no liars of my name—that you will find me with you at Pocatello. Till then let me alone, will you? Keep your eyes off me. Keep out of range of my talk. I would like to say a word now and then without knowing there’s a running comment in the mind of a man across the car, who thinks he knows me better than the people I am talking to—understand?”

“Maybe I do, maybe I don’t,” said Mr. Burke, deliberately. “I don’t know as it’s any of my business what you say to your friends, or what they think of you. All I’m responsible for is your person.”

“Precisely. At Pocatello you will have my person.”

“And have I got your word for the road between?”

“My word, and my thanks—if the thanks of a man in my situation are worth anything.”

“I’m dum sorry for you, Mr. Ludovic, and I don’t mind doing what little I can to make things easy”—Mr. Burke paused, seeing his companion smile. “Well, yes, I know it’s hard—it’s dooced almighty hard; and it looks like there was a big mistake somewheres, but it’s no business of mine to say so. Have a cigar?”

Young Mr. Ludovic had accepted a number of Mr. Burke’s palliative offers of cigars during their journey together; he accepted the courtesy, but he did not smoke the cigars. He usually gave them to the porter. He had an expensive taste in cigars, as in many other things. He paid for his high-priced preferences, or he went without. He was never willing to accept any substitute for the thing he really wanted; and it was very hard for him, when he had set his heart upon a thing, not to approach it in the attitude that an all-wise Providence had intended it for him.

About dusk the snow-plow engines from above came down for coal and water. They brought no positive word, only that the plows and shovelers were at work at both ends of the big cut, and they hoped the track would be free by daybreak. But the snow was still falling as night set in.

Ludovic and Phebe sat in the shadowed corner behind the curtains of No. 7. Phebe’s father had gone to bed early; his cough was worse, and Phebe was treating him for that and for the fever which had developed as an attendant symptom. She was a devotee in her chosen school of medicine; she knew her remedies, within the limits of her household experience, and used them with the courage and constancy that are of no school, but which better the wisdom of them all.

Ludovic observed that she never lost count of the time through all her talk, which was growing more and more absorbing; he was jealous of the interruption when she said, “Excuse me,” and looked at her watch, or rose and carried her tumblers of medicine alternately to the patient, and woke him gently; for it was now a case for strenuous treatment, and she purposed to watch out the night, and give the medicines regularly every hour.

Mr. Burke was as good as his word; he kept several seats distant from the young people. He had a private understanding, though, with the car officials: not that he put no faith in the word of a Ludovic, but business is business.

When he went to his berth about eleven o’clock he noticed that his prisoner was still keeping the little Quaker girl company, and neither of them seemed to be sleepy. The table where they had taken supper together was still between them, with Phebe’s watch and the medicine tumblers upon it. The panel of looking-glass reflected the young man’s profile, touched with gleams of lamplight, as he leaned forward with his arms upon the table.

Phebe sat far back in her corner, pale and grave; but when her eyes were lifted to his face they were as bright as winter stars.

It was Ludovic’s intention, before he parted with Phebe, to tell her his story—his own story; the newspaper account of him she would read, with all the world, after she had reached Volney. Meantime he wished to lose himself in a dream of how it might have been could he have met this little Phebe, not on a side-track, his chance already spoiled, but on the main line, with a long ticket, and the road clear before them to the Golden Gate.

Under other circumstances she might not have had the same overmastering fascination for him; he did not argue that question with himself. He talked to her all night long as a man talks to the woman he has chosen and is free to win, with but a single day in which to win her; and underneath his impassioned tones, shading and deepening them with tragic meaning, was the truth he was withholding. There was no one to stand between Phebe and this peril, and how should she know whither they were drifting?

He told her stories of his life of danger and excitement and contrasts, East and West; he told her of his work, his ambitions, his disappointments; he carried her from city to city, from camp to camp. He spoke to sparkling eyes, to fresh, thrilling sympathies, to a warm heart, a large comprehension, and a narrow experience. Every word went home; for with this girl he was strangely sure of himself, as indeed he might have been.

And still the low music of his voice went on; for he did not lack that charm, among many others—a voice for sustained and moving speech. Perhaps he did not know his own power; at all events, he was unsparing of an influence the most deliberate and enthralling to which the girl had ever been subjected.

He was a Ludovic of that family her own had ever held in highest consideration. He was that Charles Ludovic who had called himself unhappiest of his name. Phebe never forgot this fact, and in his pauses, and often in his words, she felt the tug of that strong undertow of unspoken feeling pulling him back into depths where even in thought she could not follow him.

And so they sat face to face, with the watch between them ticking away the fateful moments. For Ludovic, life ended at Pocatello, but not for Phebe.

What had he done with that faith they had given him—the gentle, generous pair! He had resisted, he thought that he was resisting, his mad attraction to this girl—of all girls the most impossible to him now, yet the one, his soul averred, most obviously designed for him. His wild, sick fancy had clung to her from the moment her face had startled him, as he took his last backward look upon the world he had forfeited.

His prayer was that he might win from Phebe, before he left her at Pocatello, some sure token of her remembrance that he might dwell upon and dream over in the years of his buried life.

It would not have been wonderful, as the hours of that strange night flew by, if Phebe had lost a moment, now and then, had sometimes wandered from the purpose of her vigil. Her thoughts strayed, but they came back duly, and she was constant to her charge. Through all that unwholesome enchantment her hold upon herself was firm, through her faithfulness to the simple duties in which she had been bred.

Meanwhile the train lay still in the darkness, and Ludovic than