h Suzette."

Hilary's face saddened as it softened. "Ah, poor thing! She'll have need
of all her pride, now."

"You mean about her father," said Louise, sobered too. "Don't you hope
he's got away?"

"What do you mean, child? That would be a very rascally wish in me."

"Well, you'd rather he had got away than been killed?"

"Why, of course, of course," Hilary ruefully assented. "But if Matt
finds he wasn't--in the accident, it's my business to do all I can to
bring him to justice. The man's a thief."

"Well, then, _I_ hope he's got away."

"You mustn't say such things, Louise."

"Oh, _no_, papa! Only _think_ them."

XVII.

Hilary had to yield to the pressure on him and send detectives to look
into the question of Northwick's fate at the scene of the accident. It
was a formal violation of his promise to Northwick that he should have
three days unmolested; but perhaps the circumstances would have
justified Hilary to any business man, and it could really matter nothing
to the defaulter dead or alive. In either case he was out of harm's way.
Matt, all the same, felt the ghastliness of being there on the same
errand with these agents of his father, and reaching the same facts with
them. At moments it seemed to him as if he were tacitly working in
agreement with them, for the same purpose as well as to the same end;
but he would not let this illusion fasten upon him; and he kept faith
with Suzette in the last degree. He left nothing undone which she could
have asked if he had done; he invented some quite useless things to do,
and did them, to give his conscience no cause against him afterwards.
The fire had left nothing but a few charred fragments of the wreck.
There had been no means of stopping it, and it had almost completely
swept away the cars in which it had broken out. Certain of the cars to
the windward were not burnt; these lay capsized beside the track, bent
and twisted, and burst athwart, fantastically like the pictures of
derailed cars as Matt had seen them in the illustrated papers; the
locomotive, pitched into a heavy drift, was like some dead monster that
had struggled hard for its life. Where the fire had raged, there was a
wide black patch in the whiteness glistening everywhere else; there were
ashes, and writhen iron-work; and bits of charred wood-work; but nothing
to tell who or how many had died there. It was certain that the porter
and the parlor-car conductor were among the lost; and h