So she lifted her eyes for an instant and let him see her answer before she slowly shook her head, while the quick breath she could not wholly control stirred the red roses on her breast.

“Now see here, old man,” said Julius Broughton, “I know the time is short and all that, and I’m going to spend this next hour in the smoking-room and let you two have a chance to talk.  But before I go my natural curiosity must be satisfied or I shall burst.  Am I to understand that that gilt-edged special that passed us just now brought you to your appointment?  And are you King of Colombia down there, or anything like that?”

Waldron turned, laughing.  His browned cheek had a touch of a still warmer colour in it, his eyes were glowing.

“That certainly was wonderful luck,” said he.  “I reached the gate just as the tail-lights of this train were disappearing.  As I turned away a man at my elbow asked if I minded missing it.  I said I minded so much that if I could afford it I would hire a special to catch it.  He said, very much as if he had been offering me a seat in his motor, that a special was to leave in a few minutes and that it would pass this train somewhere within an hour.  He turned out to be the president of the road.  We had a very interesting visit on the way down—­or it would have been interesting if it had happened at any other tune.  I was so busy keeping an eye out for sidetracked trains that I now and then lost the run of the conversation.”

“If the president of the road hadn’t turned up,” suggested Julius, “would you mind saying what other little expedient would have occurred to you?”

“I should have wired you, begging you to give me one more chance,” admitted Waldron.  “I should have wired you anyway, if I hadn’t felt that it would have spoiled my dramatic entrance at some siding.  And I wanted all the auxiliaries on my side.”

Julius went away into the smoking compartment forward with a sense of having had Fate for the second time take a hand in a more telling management of other people’s affairs than even he, with all his love of pulling wires, could effect.  He looked back as he went, to see Waldron taking Dorothy out upon the observation platform.

“It’s lucky it’s a mild April night,” he said to himself.  “I suppose it wouldn’t make any difference if a northeast blizzard were on.”

“Will it chill the roses?” Waldron asked with a smile as he closed the door behind them, shutting himself and Dorothy out into the cool, wet freshness of the night, where the two gleaming rails were slipping fast away into the blackness behind and only distant lights here and there betokened the existence of other human beings in a world that seemed all theirs.

“It wouldn’t matter if it did,” she answered.

“Wouldn’t it?  Can you possibly feel, as I do, that nothing in the world matters, now that we are together again?”

Again the direct question.  But somehow she did not in the least mind answering; she wanted to answer.  The time was so short!