They gossiped across the chasm of years about people and things, and knew nothing of the excitement so close to them, saw nothing of Chicago slipping back into the distance, with its many lights shooting across the windows like hurled torches. Suddenly a twinge of ancient jealousy shot through the man's heart, recurring to old emotions. "So you're not married, Annie. Whatever became of that fellow who used to hang round you all the time?" "Charlie Selby?" She blushed at the name, and thrilled at the luxury of meeting jealousy. "Oh, he entered the church. He's a minister out in Ogden, Utah." "I always knew he'd never amount to much," was Lathrop's epitaph on his old rival. Then he started with a new twinge: "You bound for Ogden, too?" "Oh, no," she smiled, enraptured at the new sensation of making a man anxious, and understanding all in a flash the motives that make coquettes. Then she told him her destination. "I'm on my way to China." "China!" he exclaimed. "So'm I!" She stared at him with a new thought, and gushed: "Oh, Ira--are you a missionary, too?" "Missionary? Hell, no!" he roared. "Excuse me--I'm an importer--Anne, I--I----" But the sonorous swear reverberated in their ears like a smitten bell, and he blushed for it, but could not recall it. CHAPTER XII THE NEEDLE IN THE HAYSTACK The almost-married couple sat long in mutual terror and a common paralysis of ingenuity. Marjorie, for lack of anything better to do, was absent-mindedly twisting Snoozleums's ears, while he, that pocket abridgment of a dog, in a well meaning effort to divert her from her evident grief, made a great pretence of ferocity, growling and threatening to bite her fingers off. The new ring attracted his special jealousy. He was growing discouraged at the ill-success of his impersonation of a wolf, and dejected at being so crassly ignored, when he suddenly became, in his turn, a center of interest. Marjorie was awakened from her trance of inanition by the porter's voice. His plantation voice was ordinarily as thick and sweet as his own New Orleans sorghum, but now it had a bitterness that curdled the blood: "'Scuse me, but how did you-all git that theah dog in this heah cah?" "Snoozleums is always with me," said Marjorie briskly, as if that settled it, and turned for confirmation to the dog himself, "aren't you, Snoozleums?" "Well," the porter drawled, trying to be gracious with his great power, "the rules don't 'low no live stock in the sleepin' cars, 'ceptin' humans." Marjorie rewarded his condescension with a blunt: "Snoozleums is more human than you are." "I p'sume he is," the porter admitted, "but he can't make up berths. Anyway, the rules says dogs goes with the baggage." Marjorie swept rules aside with a defiant: "I don't care. I won't be separated from my Snoozleums." She looked to Mallory for support, but he was too sorely troubled with greater anxieties to be capable of any action.