She was awakened from a half drowse at the next stop by the sound of a voice that sent terror through her heart. It was the same hoarse voice breaking out in raucous laughter that she had heard half subdued in the graveyard the night before, the one they had called “Kid.” CHAPTER VIII Joyce sat up startled and peered furtively from her window. The man was outside waiting to board the car. He was big and red and ugly, with bold blue eyes and red hair. He had a weak mouth and a cruel jaw, and she couldn’t help shrinking into her corner as she looked. Suppose he had been the one to catch her and hold her hands in a vise-like grip last night! Her soul turned sick within her. He came up the steps prating in a loud voice about women, called them “dames” and “skirts,” and his laughter was an offense. Laughter is like smells, it can be fragrant as the morning or it can be foul as the breath of a gutter. This man’s laughter was like a noxious gas. Joyce would have fled if the aisle had not been blocked either way. Failing in that she shrank still further back in her seat, drew her hat over her eyes, and found herself trembling in every fibre. Why did such a man have to be on the earth, she wondered as she heard his voice going on in coarse remarks. And what possible companionship, even in business, could he have with the man she knew, whom she had always thought fine of soul? The stab of that question came into her morning with renewed sharpness as she was compelled to sit and listen, as were all the rest of the passengers in the car, to this crude man’s conversation. There was nothing to fear of course, for it was broad daylight and there were plenty of men in the car whose faces told that they would defend her. They might be all common workingmen, but they had homes and mothers and wives and sisters and they respected them. There was a kind of nobleness in their faces that made one sure of that. Joyce sat motionless and tried to still the trembling of her lips, tried to control the foolish desire to let the tears come into her eyes, tried to tell herself she was silly, and only needed her breakfast and there was no sense in her giving way to her feelings like this. This man did not know her. He had no idea that she had been the intruder at his midnight work. Oh, that work--that terrible work! What was it that bound these men together, the one so coarse, the other who had always seemed so fine? It haunted her with dark possibilities. Some money making scheme of course it was. But--it must be something terrible! She could not forget the look, the droop of the man in the darkness, when she had asked him about it.