I think Evan Cummings had the most remarkable personality of any traveling man I ever met, a personality which indicated itself especially in the closing incident of his love affair. He was a good-looking fellow, of Scotch descent, with all the tenacity of purpose of his race. He was a good man to meet upon the train. When we were gathered in the smoking compartment Evan was as full of spirits as the rest, but I noticed that, while taking an active part in the conversation, he never told any of the somewhat risque stories that the air of the smoking compartment too often breeds. Instead, he would tell uncanny tales of Scotland in the old days, tales of wizards and warlocks, and of the strange things to be seen at night on ancient battle-fields, and we always listened to him with interest. He was mightily fixed in his views and many a good-natured dispute we had with him over this or that. Eh, but he was stubborn! Evan was a good man of business, though, and had a host of friends. Among these was the conductor of a train on which he often traveled and the friendship developed into such a degree of intimacy that one day the conductor, Luke Johnson, invited him out to dinner with him. Evan, having no particular business on hand that evening, accepted the invitation. Johnson's house was in the suburbs, decidedly. It was on the very picket line of the army of houses of the ever-marching city, out on the prairie at least a couple of blocks distant from any other house. A plank sidewalk extended to it from the more settled district near and, with its barns and sheds and vine-covered front, it did not have a lonesome look. Inside Evan found the house quite as prepossessing as its exterior and he found something else there more prepossessing still. Johnson's family consisted of himself, his wife, his child, little Gabriel, about four years old, and his sister-in-law, a Miss Salome Hinman. Evan found Mrs. Johnson a pleasant sort of a woman and found in Miss Hinman his undeniable affinity. Stolid as he usually was in the presence of femininity, he felt, in the very marrow of his bones, that he was a lost man. That he succumbed so quickly was not altogether to be wondered at. Miss Hinman was pretty, was very slender--what a school-girl writer would call willowy or lissom or, possibly, svelte--and was wildly devoted to her little nephew, of whom she had the chief care.