"Would you like to go to California? If you want to take back your maiden name and be Miss Grayle--or if you care to have a new name to begin a new life with, a quite respectable fellow called Michael Donaldson could introduce you to a few influential people in Los Angeles. No danger of meeting Madalena de Santiago there, though it's only a day's journey from San Francisco, where she's very likely arrived by this time. She has reasons for not liking Los Angeles. In her early days she had some--er-financial troubles there, and she wouldn't enjoy being reminded of them." "Is Los Angeles farther than El Paso?" Annesley inquired, keeping her voice steady, though there was a sickly chill in her heart. "A good way farther," Knight went on, in the same businesslike tone which separated him thousands of miles from the Knight she used to know. "Here, I'll show you how the land lies." Opening a map of a western railroad, he drew a little closer to her on the seat, and pointed out place after place along the black line; told her when they would arrive at Kansas City, and how they would go on without change to Albuquerque. There, he said, he must take another train for El Paso, and from El Paso he must go a distance of twenty miles to the ranch, which lay close to the border of Mexico, on the Rio Grande. "But you," he said, quietly, "you can keep straight along in the train we'll get into at Chicago till you come to Los Angeles. There'll be time in Chicago to buy your ticket to California, and I can write letters of introduction. They'll be to good people. You needn't be afraid." Yet Annesley _was_ afraid, deathly afraid. Not that Knight's friends would not be "good people," but of going on alone to an unknown place in an unknown country. It would not have been so terrible, she thought, to have stayed in New York--if only the Waldos hadn't interfered. But to have this man--who, after all, was her one link with the old world--get out of the train which was hurling them through space and leave her to go on alone! That was a fearful thing. She could not face the thought--at least not yet. Perhaps she would feel more courageous to-morrow. On the ship she had slept little. Her nerves felt like violin strings stretched too tight--stretched to the point of breaking. "Does that plan suit you--as well as any other?" Knight was asking. "I--can't decide yet," the girl answered; and to keep tears back seemed the most important thing just then. "It doesn't matter, does it, as I _must_ go on past Kansas City?" "No, it doesn't matter," Knight agreed. "You've plenty of time. I suppose you'd like me to leave you now, to rest till dinner time? Here's the guide-book. You might care to look it over." But when he had gone Annesley let the book lie unopened on the seat. She was very tired. She could not think far ahead. Her mind would occupy itself with the features of the journey, not with her own affairs.