“Oh, Helen, don’t,” said Mary, trembling. “...I think he was saying good-bye....  Wait till I put the light on....”

The distress in her voice cheeked Helen’s anger, and a moment later the two cousins were staring at each other, two tragic figures suddenly uncovered from the mantle of light.

“I won’t go back to my room; I’ll stay here,” whispered Helen at last.  “Don’t fret, Mary; he won’t do anything.”

It was a long time, though, before Mary could stop trembling, but an hour later when the telephone bell began ringing downstairs, she found that her old habit of calmness had fallen on her again.

“I’ll answer it,” she said to Helen.  “Don’t cry now.  I’m sure it’s nothing.”

But when she returned in a few minutes, Helen only needed one glance to tell her how far it was from being nothing.

“Your maid,” said Mary, hurrying to her dresser.  “Wally’s car ran into the Bar Harbor express at the crossing near the club....  He’s terribly hurt, but the doctor says there’s just a chance....  You run and dress now, as quickly as you can....  I have a key to the garage....”

CHAPTER XXXII

The first east-bound express that left New York the following morning carried in one of its Pullmans a famous surgeon and his assistant, bound for New Bethel.  In the murk of the smoker ahead was a third passenger whose ticket bore the name of the same city—­a bearded man with rounded shoulders and tired eyes, whose clothes betrayed a foreign origin.

This was Paul Spencer on the last stage of his journey home.

Until the train drew out of the station, the seat by his side was unoccupied.  But then another foreign looking passenger entered and made his way up the aisle.

You have probably noticed how some instinctive law of selection seems to guide us in choosing our companion in a car where all the window seats are taken.  The newcomer passed a number of empty places and sat down by the side of Paul.  He was tall, blonde, with dusty looking eyebrows and a beard that was nearly the colour of dead grass.

“Russian, I guess,” thought Paul, “and probably thinks I am something of the same.”

The reflection pleased him.

“If that’s the way I look to him, nobody else is going to guess.”

When the conductor came, Paul’s seat-mate tried to ask if he would have to change cars before reaching his destination, but his language was so broken that he couldn’t make himself understood.

“I thought he was Russian,” Paul nodded to himself, catching a word here and there; and, aloud, he quietly added in his mother’s tongue, “It’s all right, batuchka; you don’t have to change.”

The other gave him a grateful glance, and soon they were talking together.

“A Bolshevist,” thought Paul, recognizing now and then a phrase or an argument which he had heard from some of his friends in Rio, “but what’s he going to New Bethel for?”