"In what particular way?"
"When we get across the Idaho line and into the mountains, you are to
ride behind a double-header driving a rotary snow-plow."
"A double-header? You mean two locomotives?"
"Yes; the preparation is warrant that what is ahead of us in the way of
travel will fully come up to anything you may have been led to expect."
They stood a minute watching the trainmen; as they turned, his gaze
went past her to the rear cars. "Also," he added, "Mr. Avery, with his
usual gracious pleasure at my being in your company, is hailing you
from the platform of your car."
She looked up at Eaton sharply, seemed about to speak, and then checked
what was upon her tongue. "You are going into your own car?" She held
out to him her small gloved hand. "Good-by, then--until we see one
another again."
"Good night, Miss Dorne."
He took her hand and retaining it hardly the fraction of an instant,
let it go. Was it her friendship she had been offering him? Men use
badinage without respect to what their actual feelings may be;
women--some memory from the past in which he had known such girls as
this, seemed to recall--use it most frequently when their feelings,
consciously or unconsciously, are drawing toward a man.
Eaton now went into the men's compartment of his car, where he sat
smoking till after the train was under way again. The porter looked in
upon him there to ask if he wished his berth made up now; Eaton nodded
assent, and fifteen minutes later, dropping the cold end of his cigar
and going out into the car, he found the berth ready for him. "D.
S.'s" section, also made up but with the curtains folded back
displaying the bedding within, was unoccupied; jerkings of the
curtains, and voices and giggling in the two berths at the end of the
car, showed that Amy and Constance were getting into bed; the
Englishman was wide awake in plain determination not to go to bed until
his accustomed Nottingham hour. Eaton, drawing his curtains together
and buttoning them from the inside, undressed and went to bed. A
half-hour later the passage of some one through the aisle and the
sudden dimming of the crack of light which showed above the curtains
told him that the lights in the car had been turned down. Eaton closed
his eyes, but sleep was far from him.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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