“I didn’t!” She cut him off sharply. “I couldn’t. Why, it wouldn’t have been nice! What made you dream I would do a thing like that? How dare you imagine such things!” At first dumfounded, then appalled, he took the long, swift, sickening descent from his golden cloud with his mouth open, but it snapped tight at the bump with which he struck the earth. He lay prone, dismayed, abject. The lovely witch could have made him believe anything; at least it is the fact that for a moment she made him believe he had imagined that angelic little caress; and perhaps it was the sight of his utter subjection that melted her. For she flashed upon him suddenly with a dazing smile, and then, blushing again but more deeply than before, her whole attitude admitting and yielding, she offered full and amazing confession, her delicious laugh rippling tremulously throughout every word of it. “It must have been an accident—partly!” “I love you!” he shouted. The translucent fat man and his wife groped for each other feverishly, and a coloured porter touched Henry Millick Chester on the shoulder. “Be in Richmon’ less’n fi’ minutes now,” said the porter. He tapped the youth’s shoulder twice more; it is his office to awaken the rapt dreamer. “Richmon,’ In’iana, less’n fi’ minutes now,” he repeated more slowly. Henry gave him a stunned and dishevelled “What?” “You get off Richmon’, don’t you?” “What of it? We haven’t passed Dayton yet.” “Yessuh, long ’go. Pass’ Dayton eight-fifty. Be in Richmon’ mighty quick now.” The porter appeared to be a malicious liar. Henry appealed pitifully to the girl. “But we haven’t passed Dayton?” “Yes, just after you sat down by me. We stopped several minutes.” “Yessuh. Train don’t stop no minutes in Richmon’ though,” said the porter with a hard laugh, waving his little broom at some outlying freight cars they were passing. “Gittin’ in now. I got you’ bag on platfawm.” “I don’t want to be brushed,” Henry said, almost sobbing. “For heaven’s sake, get out!” Porters expect anything. This one went away solemnly without even lifting his eyebrows. The brakes were going on. One class of railway tragedies is never recorded, though it is the most numerous of all and fills the longest list of heartbreaks; the statics ignore it, yet no train ever leaves its shed, or moves, that is not party to it. It is time and overtime that the safety-device inventors should turn their best attention to it, so that the happy day may come at last when we shall see our common carriers equipped with something to prevent these lovers’ partings. The train began to slow down. Henry Millick Chester got waveringly to his feet; she rose at the same time and stood beside him. “I am no boy,” he began, hardly knowing what he said, but automatically quoting a fragment from his forthcoming address to his father. “I have reached man’s estate and I have met the only——” He stopped short with an exclamation of horror. “You—you haven’t even told me your name!”