ance from Mrs. Klopton, with slippers to match.

So, naturally, when I saw a feminine figure on the platform, my first
instinct was to dodge. The woman, however, was quicker than I; she
gave me a startled glance, wheeled and disappeared, with a flash of two
bronze-colored braids, into the next car.

Cigarette box in one hand, match in the other, I leaned against the
uncertain frame of the door and gazed after her vanished figure. The
mountain air flapped my bath-robe around my bare ankles, my one match
burned to the end and went out, and still I stared. For I had seen
on her expressive face a haunting look that was horror, nothing less.
Heaven knows, I am not psychological. Emotions have to be written large
before I can read them. But a woman in trouble always appeals to me, and
this woman was more than that. She was in deadly fear.

If I had not been afraid of being ridiculous, I would have followed
her. But I fancied that the apparition of a man in a red and yellow
bath-robe, with an unkempt thatch of hair, walking up to her and
assuring her that he would protect her would probably put her into
hysterics. I had done that once before, when burglars had tried to break
into the house, and had startled the parlor maid into bed for a week.
So I tried to assure myself that I had imagined the lady's distress--or
caused it, perhaps--and to dismiss her from my mind. Perhaps she was
merely anxious about the unpleasant gentleman of the restaurant. I
thought smugly that I could have told her all about him: that he was
sleeping the sleep of the just and the intoxicated in a berth that
ought, by all that was fair and right, to have been mine, and that if I
were tied to a man who snored like that I should have him anesthetized
and his soft palate put where it would never again flap like a loose
sail in the wind.

We passed Harrisburg as I stood there. It was starlight, and the great
crests of the Alleghanies had given way to low hills. At intervals we
passed smudges of gray white, no doubt in daytime comfortable farms,
which McKnight says is a good way of putting it, the farms being a lot
more comfortable than the people on them.

I was growing drowsy: the woman with the bronze hair and the horrified
face was fading in retrospect. It was colder, too, and I turned with a
shiver to go in. As I did so a bit of paper fluttered into the air and
settled on my sleeve, like a butterfly on a gorgeous red and yellow
blossom. I picked it