ormless brick box which he remembered as
the Sea Board Depot, and he insisted upon that when the fellow got down
to open the door.

"Ain't no Sibbod Dippo, now," the driver explained, contemptuously.
"Guess Union Dippo'll do, though;" and Gaites, a little overcome with
its splendor, found that it would. He faltered a moment in passing the
conductor and porter at the end of the Pullman car on his train, and
then decided that it would be ridiculous to take a seat in it for the
short run to Burymouth. In the common coach he got a very good seat on
the shady side, where he put down his hand-bag. Then he looked at his
watch, and as it was still fifteen minutes before train-time, he
indulged a fantastic impulse. He left the car and hurried back through
the station and out through the electrics, hacks, herdics, carts, and
string-teams of Causeway Street, and up the sidewalk of the street
opening into it, as far as the S. B. & H. C. freight-depot. On the way
he bet himself five dollars that Miss Desmond's piano would not be
there, and lost; for at the moment he came up it was unloading from the
end of the truck which he had seen carrying it past the window of his
restaurant.

The fact amused him quite beyond the measure of anything intrinsically
humorous in it, and he staid watching the exertions of the heated
truckman and two silk-capped, sarcastic-faced freight-men, till the
piano was well on the platform. He was so intent upon it that his
interest seemed to communicate itself to a young girl coming from the
other quarter, with a suburban, cloth-sided, crewel-initialed bag in her
hand, as if she were going to a train. She paused in the stare she gave
the piano-case, and then slowed her pace with a look over her shoulder
after she got by. In this her eyes met his, and she blushed and hurried
on; but not so soon that he had not time to see she had a thin face of a
pathetic prettiness, gentle brown eyes with wistful brows, under
ordinary brown hair. She was rather little, and was dressed with a sort
of unaccented propriety, which was as far from distinction as it was
from pretension.

When Gaites got back to his car, a few minutes before the train was to
start, he found the seat where he had left his hand-bag and light
overcoat more than half full of a bulky lady, who looked stupidly up at
him, and did not move or attempt any excuse for crowding him from his
place. He had to walk the whole length of the car before he came to