“I didn’t expect you would--after what you have been telling me. But we needn’t quarrel about it,” he went on good-naturedly. “I suppose you would call your family patrician and mine plebeian--which it doubtless is; at any rate, it is farmer stock on both sides as far back as I know anything about it, people who worked with their hands, and----” “It was no disgrace for them to work with their hands; that isn’t at all what I meant. It is something much bigger than that.” “Well, what is it, then? A clean family record?” “Honor above everything: not being willing--not being able to stoop to anything low or mean or----” “Exactly,” said Philip. “I guess we’re not so very far apart, after all; though I doubt if I could tell you the Christian name of any one of my four great-grandfathers--to say nothing of the great-grandmothers. But look out of the window! Houses, if my eyes don’t deceive me. This must be Denver that we’re coming to.” Rounding a curve so long and gentle as to make the changing direction approximate the slow inching of a clock’s minute-hand, the train was beginning to pass signs of human occupancy, or of former occupancy; on the right a collection of empty, tumble-down shacks and the ruin of what seemed to be a smelting works. A little farther along, the fringe of the inhabited town was passed, and the clanking of switch frogs under the wheels signalled the approach to the freight yards. Over a swelling hill to the northward the mountains came into view in peaks and masses against which the plain seemed to end with startling abruptness. When the brakes began to grind, Philip excused himself and went to get his hand luggage out of the rack over the seat he had formerly occupied. “If I can be of any assistance?” he offered when he came back. “Oh, I think we can manage, thank you; there are so many of us to carry things,” the young woman replied. “Besides, we’ll have to take a carriage--on the Captain’s account.” With his attention thus drawn again to the invalid, Philip had a sharp recurrence of the doubt as to whether the change of climate had been determined upon soon enough to warrant any hope of recovery for the hollow-eyed man in the seat ahead. For the past half-hour the sick man had been coughing unobtrusively, and he seemed to have increasing difficulty in breathing. Since Kansas City was the gateway for westbound invalids, as well as for the mineral-mad treasure-seekers, Philip had heard stories of the marvelous cures effected by the Colorado climate; also he had heard that those who went too late were apt to die very quickly, the swift railroad flight from an altitude of a few hundred feet to that of a mile high proving too sudden a change for the weakened lungs. Acting wholly upon an impulse which he did not stop to define, or to square with the New England reticences, Philip bent to speak to the card-playing giant who had freed the young woman of her persecutor.