Quite naturally, Lidgerwood sought to pair the younger people when the table gathering was complete, and was not entirely certain of his prefiguring. Eleanor Brewster and Van Lew sat together and were apparently absorbed in each other to the exclusion of all things extraneous. Jefferis had Miss Doty for a companion, and the affliction of her well-balanced tongue seemed to affect neither his appetite nor his enjoyment of what the young woman had to say. Miriam Holcombe had fallen to Lidgerwood's lot, and at first he thought that her silence was due to the fact that young Jefferis had gotten upon the wrong side of the table. But after she began to talk, he changed his mind. "Tell me about the wrecked train we passed a little while ago, Mr. Lidgerwood," she began, almost abruptly. "Was any one killed?" "No; it was a freight, and the crew escaped. It was a rather narrow escape, though, for the engineer, and fireman." "You were putting it back on the track?" she asked. "There isn't much of it left to put back, as you may have observed," said Lidgerwood. Then he told her of the explosion and the fire. She was silent for a few moments, but afterward she went on, half-gropingly he thought. "Is that part of your work--to get the trains on the track when they run off?" He laughed. "I suppose it is--or at least, in a certain sense, I'm responsible for it. But I am lucky enough to have a wrecking-boss--two of them, in fact, and both good ones." She looked up quickly, and he was sure that he surprised something more than a passing interest in the serious eyes--a trouble depth, he would have called it, had their talk been anything more than the ordinary conventional table exchange. "We saw you go down to speak to two of your men: one who wore his hat pulled down over his eyes and made dreadful faces at you as he talked----" "That was McCloskey, our trainmaster," he cut in. "And the other----?" "Was wrecking-boss Number Two," he told her, "my latest apprentice, and a very promising young subject. This was his first time out under my administration, and he put McCloskey and me out of the running at once." "What did he do?" she asked, and again he saw the groping wistfulness in her eyes, and wondered at it. "I couldn't explain it without being unpardonably technical. But perhaps it can best be summed up in saying that he is a fine mechanical engineer with the added gift of knowing how to handle men." "You are generous, Mr. Lidgerwood, to--to a subordinate. He ought to be very loyal to you." "He is. And I don't think of him as a subordinate--I shouldn't even if he were on my pay-roll instead of on that of the motive-power department. I am glad to be able to call him my friend, Miss Holcombe." Again a few moments of silence, during which Lidgerwood was staring gloomily across at Miss Brewster and Van Lew. Then another curiously abrupt question from the young woman at his side.