“I do like you,” she admitted; “more than any one I have ever known, I think.”

The drumming wheels and a long-drawn trumpet blast from the locomotive made a shield of sound to isolate them.  The elderly banker in the opposite section was nodding over his newspaper; and the newly married ones were oblivious, each to all else but the other.  Mrs. Brentwood was apparently sleeping peacefully three seats away; and Penelope was invisible.

“There was a time when I should have begged hard for something more, Elinor; but now I’m willing to take what I can get, and be thankful.  Will you give me the right to make you as happy as I can on the unemotional basis?”

She felt herself slipping.

“If you could fully understand——­”

“I understand that you don’t love me, in the novelist’s sense of the word, and I am not asking more than you can give.  But if you can give me the little now, and more when I have won it—­don’t curl your lip at me, please:  I’m trying to put it as mildly as I can.”

She was looking at him level-eyed, and he could have sworn that she was never calmer or more self-possessed.

“I don’t know why you should want my promise—­or any woman’s—­on such conditions,” she said evenly.

“But I do,” he insisted.

The lights of a town suburb were flitting past the windows, and the monotonous song of the tires was drowned in the shrill crescendo of the brakes.  She turned from him suddenly and laid her cheek against the grateful cool of the window-pane.  But when he took her hand she did not withdraw it.

“Is it mine, Elinor?” he whispered.  “You see, I’m not asking much.”

“Is it worth taking—­by itself?”

“You make me very happy,” he said quietly; and just then the train stopped with a jerk, and a shuffling bustle of station-platform noises floated in through the open deck transoms of the car.

As if the solution of continuity had been a call to arouse her, Elinor freed her hand with a swift little wrench and sat bolt upright in her corner.

“This station—­do you know the name of it?” she asked, fighting hard for the self-control that usually came so easily.

Ormsby consulted his watch.

“I am not quite sure.  It ought to be——­”

He broke off when he saw that she was no longer listening to him.  There was a stir in the forward vestibule, and the porter came in with a hand-bag.  At his heels was a man in a rough-weather box-coat; a youngish man, clean-shaven and wind-tanned to a healthy bronze, with an eager face and alert eyes that made an instant inventory of the car and its complement of passengers.  So much Ormsby saw.  Then Penelope stood up in her place to greet the new-comer.

“Why, Mr. Kent!” she exclaimed.  “Are you really going on with us?  How nice of you!”

Elinor turned coolly upon her seat-mate, self-possession once more firmly seated in the saddle.