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lock they met on the parlor floor and Glover led her to the elevator, which was being run that night by Solomon Battershawl. Solomon lifted them to the top floor and made busy at the end of the hall while they had five short minutes. When they descended he knew what she was facing. Even Marie, the one friend he thought he had in the family, had taken a stand against them, and her father was deaf to every appeal. They parted, depressed, with only a hand pressure, a look and a whisper of constancy. At midnight, as Glover lay thinking, a crew caller rapped at his door. He brought a message and held his electric pocket-lamp near, while Glover, without getting up, read the telegram. It was from Bucks asking if he could take a rotary at once into the Heart Mountains. Glover knew snow had been falling steadily on the main line for two days. East of the middle range it was nothing but extreme cold, west it had been one long storm. Morris Blood was at Goose River. The message was not an order; but on the division there was no one else available at the moment that could handle safely such a battery of engines as would be needed to bore the drifts west of the sheds. Moreover, Glover knew how Bucks had chafed under the conditions that kept the directors on his hands. They were impatient to get to the coast, and the general manager was anxious to be rid of them as soon as there should be some certainty of getting them safely over the mountains. Glover, on the back of the telegram, scrawled a note to Crosby, the master-mechanic, and turned over not to sleep, but to think--and to think, not of the work before him, but of her and of her situation. A roundhouse caller roused him at half-past three with word that the snow battery was marked up for four o'clock. He rose, dressed deliberately and carefully for the exposure ahead, and sat down before a candle to tell Gertrude, in a note, when he hoped to be back. Locking his trunk when he had done, he snuffed out the candle and closed his room door behind him. The hall was dark, but he knew its turns, and the carpeted stairs gave no sound as he walked down. At the second floor there were two stairways by which he could descend. He looked up the dim corridor toward where she slept. Somehow he could not make up his mind to leave without passing her room. His heavy tread was noiseless, and at her door he paused and put his hand uncertainly upon the casing. In the dar
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