“My name?” the girl said, a little startled. “Yes! And your address!” “I’m not on my way home now,” she said. “I’ve been visiting in New York and I’m going to St. Louis to make another visit.” “But your name!” She gave him an odd glance of mockery, a little troubled. “You mightn’t like my name!” “Oh, please, please!” “Besides, do you think it’s quite proper for me to——” “Oh, please! To talk of that now! Please!” The train had stopped. The glint of a sudden decision shone in the lovely eyes. “I’ll write it for you so you won’t forget.” She went quickly to the writing desk at the end of the compartment, he with her, the eyes of the fat man and his wife following them like two pairs of searchlights swung by the same mechanism. “And where you live,” urged Henry. “I shall write to you every day.” He drew a long, deep breath and threw back his head. “Till the day—the day when I come for you.” “Don’t look over my shoulder.” She laughed shyly, wrote hurriedly upon a loose sheet, placed it in an envelope, sealed the envelope, and then, as he reached to take it, withheld it tantalizingly. “No. It’s my name and where I live, but you can’t have it. Not till you’ve promised not to open it until the train is clear out of the station.” Outside the window sounded the twice-repeated “Awl aboh-oh,” and far ahead a fatal bell was clanging. “I promise,” he gulped. “Then take it!” With a strange, new-born masterfulness he made a sudden impetuous gesture and lifted both the precious envelope and the fingers that inclosed it to his lips. Then he turned and dashed to the forward end of the car where a porter remained untipped as Henry leaped from the already rapidly moving steps of the car to the ground. Instantly the wonderful girl was drawn past him, leaning and waving from the railed rear platform whither she had run for this farewell. And in the swift last look that they exchanged there was in her still-flushing, lovely face a light of tenderness and of laughter, of kindness and of something like a fleeting regret. The train gained momentum, skimming onward and away, the end of the observation car dwindling and condensing into itself like a magician’s disappearing card, while a white handkerchief, waving from the platform, quickly became an infinitesimal shred of white—and then there was nothing. The girl was gone. Probably Henry Millick Chester owes his life to the fact that there are no gates between the station building and the tracks at Richmond. For gates and a ticket-clipping official might have delayed Henry’s father in the barely successful dash he made to drag from the path of a backing local a boy wholly lost to the outward world in a state of helpless puzzlement, which already threatened to become permanent as he stared and stared at a sheet of railway notepaper whereon was written in a charming hand: Mary Smith Chicago Ill.