But the man watching the ever-changing panorama of gorgeously colored and fantastically unreal landscape was not thinking of the scenes that, to him, were new and strange.  His thoughts were far away.  Among those mountains grouped about San Gorgonio, the real value of the inheritance he had received from his mother was to be tested.  On the pine-fringed ridge of the Galenas, among those granite cliffs and jagged peaks, the mettle of his manhood was to be tried under a strain such as few men in this commonplace work-a-day old world are-subjected to.  But the young man did not know this.

On the long journey across the continent, he had paid little heed to the sights that so interested his fellow passengers.  To his fellow passengers, themselves, he had been as indifferent.  To those who had approached him casually, as the sometimes tedious hours passed, he had been quietly and courteously unresponsive.  This well-bred but decidedly marked disinclination to mingle with them, together with the undeniably distinguished appearance of the young man, only served to center the interest of the little world of the Pullmans more strongly upon him.  Keeping to himself, and engrossed with his own thoughts, he became the object of many idle conjectures.

Among the passengers whose curious eyes were so often turned in his direction, there was one whose interest was always carefully veiled.  She was a woman of evident rank and distinction in that world where rank and distinction are determined wholly by dollars and by such social position as dollars can buy.  She was beautiful; but with that carefully studied, wholly self-conscious—­one is tempted to say professional—­beauty of her kind.  Her full rounded, splendidly developed body was gowned to accentuate the alluring curves of her sex.  With such skill was this deliberate appeal to the physical hidden under a cloak of a pretending modesty that its charm was the more effectively revealed.  Her features were almost too perfect.  She was too coldly sure of herself—­too perfectly trained in the art of self-repression.  For a woman as young as she evidently was, she seemed to know too much.  The careful indifference of her countenance seemed to say, “I am too well schooled in life to make mistakes.”  She was traveling with two companions—­a fluffy, fluttering, characterless shadow of womanhood, and a man—­an invalid who seldom left the privacy of the drawing-room which he occupied.

As the train neared the summit of the pass, the young man on the observation car platform looked at his watch.  A few miles more and he would arrive at his destination.  Rising to his feet, he drew a deep breath of the glorious, sun-filled air.  With his back to the door, and looking away into the distance, he did not notice the woman who, stepping from the car at that moment, stood directly behind him, steadying herself by the brass railing in front of the window.  To their idly observing fellow passengers, the woman, too, appeared interested in the distant landscape.  She might have been looking at the only other occupant of the platform.  The passengers, from where they sat, could not have told.