"The _Marchioness_," she responded, "is not going after all. That's why I wired you. But I'm glad you came, because, somehow, I wanted you to know--before it appeared in the papers----" She paused, and then added, with much feeling: "The Grand Jury has indicted my father--late yesterday afternoon. As yet no one knows it; but everybody will know it by nine o'clock this morning. It may be in the papers now, though they tried to keep it out. It's a terrible thing--a thing like that! I can't see how, or why, they indicted him! Can you?" Beekman looked his sympathy. Presently he asked: "Do you mind my asking just what they charge him with?" VII The Empire State Express had not travelled many miles when Eliot Beekman's attention was directed to a strange-looking man who sat across the aisle, facing him. From time to time the man's face flushed and gave little nervous starts and twitches, and, every now and then, he mumbled to himself. At first Beekman figured out that the man was recovering from an unaccustomed debauch; but afterwards he changed his mind: he decided that he was crazy. "Glad to get away from New York," confided the stranger, breaking in on Beekman's meditations, and tapping him on the knee. "The farther away I get the better I like it." Beekman somewhat resented this interference with his comfortable somnolence, but he straightened up and smiled and answered: "For my part New York's home to me. I feel sick, somehow, when I'm away from it." The man swung about and glanced nervously at the changing landscape, and then suddenly turned back again and exhibited a pocket volume with flexible covers. "Dante's Inferno," he declared, pointing to the book. "Ever delve into it? I've just recently been through a little inferno of my own," he went on. "I brought this with me, because I've got to keep before my mind the fact that some people have gone through more than I have. At least, so it seems to me. At the same time, I don't know that I'm ready to change places with any of the chaps in here." He tapped the book. "Neat little volume," he commented, rattling on nervously and without apparently keeping much track of what he was saying. "See the frontispiece," he said, leaning over towards Beekman. "It's Dante himself. I wonder why he always wears that headgear? Never see him without it! Always reminds me of a little verse on how to tell the names of busts." "'I recognise Dante because he's tab-eared.' Tab-eared, you know," he went on, "is his peculiar sort of headgear. All sculptors give it to him." He resumed in sing-song fashion: "'I recognise Dante, because he's tab-eared, And Virgil I know by his wreath, Old Homer I tell by his rough, shaggy beard, And the rest--_by the names underneath_.'" Beekman laughed aloud. "Good! Mighty good!" he cried. "Especially 'and the rest by the names underneath.' A flash of genius that."