With other men Dorothy Broughton had used every feminine art of evasion and withdrawal at moments of crisis, but she could not use them with this man.

She shook her head, laying one hand against her rose-red cheek, like a shy and lovely child—­yet like a woman, too.

He gently took the hand away from the glowing cheek, and kept it fast in his.

“I fell desperately in love with you when I was fifteen,” said Kirke Waldron.  “I carried the image of you all through my boyhood and into manhood.  I saw you at different times while you were growing up, although you didn’t see me.  I kept track of you.  I thought you never could be for me.  But when we met last summer I knew that if I couldn’t have you I should never want anybody.  And when—­something happened that made you glad for just a minute to be with me, I knew I should never let you go.  Then you gave me that last look and I dared to believe that you could be made to care.  Dorothy—­they were pretty poor letters from a literary point of view that I’ve been sending you all these months, but I tried to put myself into them so that you could know just what sort of fellow I was.  And I tried to make you see, without actually telling you, what you were to me.  Did I succeed?”

“They were fine letters,” said Dorothy Broughton.  “Splendid, manly letters.  I liked them very much.  I—­loved them!”

“Oh!” said Kirke Waldron, and became suddenly silent with joy.

After a minute he looked up at the too brilliant electric lights which flooded the platform.  He glanced in at the occupants of the car, nearly all facing forward, except for one or two who were palpably asleep—­negligible certainly.  Then he put his head inside the door, scanning the woodwork beside it.  He reached upward with one hand and in the twinkling of an eye the observation platform was in darkness.

“Oh!” breathed Dorothy in her turn.  But the next thing that happened was the thing which might have been expected of a resourceful young mining engineer, trained, as he himself had said, “to action—­all the time!”

THE END