ad approached him
casually, as the sometimes tedious hours passed, he had been quietly and
courteously unresponsive. This well-bred but decidedly marked
disinclination to mingle with them, together with the undeniably
distinguished appearance of the young man, only served to center the
interest of the little world of the Pullmans more strongly upon him.
Keeping to himself, and engrossed with his own thoughts, he became the
object of many idle conjectures.

Among the passengers whose curious eyes were so often turned in his
direction, there was one whose interest was always carefully veiled. She
was a woman of evident rank and distinction in that world where rank and
distinction are determined wholly by dollars and by such social position
as dollars can buy. She was beautiful; but with that carefully studied,
wholly self-conscious--one is tempted to say professional--beauty of her
kind. Her full rounded, splendidly developed body was gowned to
accentuate the alluring curves of her sex. With such skill was this
deliberate appeal to the physical hidden under a cloak of a pretending
modesty that its charm was the more effectively revealed. Her features
were almost too perfect. She was too coldly sure of herself--too perfectly
trained in the art of self-repression. For a woman as young as she
evidently was, she seemed to know too much. The careful indifference of
her countenance seemed to say, "I am too well schooled in life to make
mistakes." She was traveling with two companions--a fluffy, fluttering,
characterless shadow of womanhood, and a man--an invalid who seldom left
the privacy of the drawing-room which he occupied.

As the train neared the summit of the pass, the young man on the
observation car platform looked at his watch. A few miles more and he
would arrive at his destination. Rising to his feet, he drew a deep breath
of the glorious, sun-filled air. With his back to the door, and looking
away into the distance, he did not notice the woman who, stepping from the
car at that moment, stood directly behind him, steadying herself by the
brass railing in front of the window. To their idly observing fellow
passengers, the woman, too, appeared interested in the distant landscape.
She might have been looking at the only other occupant of the platform.
The passengers, from where they sat, could not have told.

As he stood there,--against the background of the primitive, many-colored
landscape,--the young man might eas