He did not know the man.  Turning swiftly to the young lady at his side, he caught sight of a smile and a slight uplifting of her eyebrows.

Undoubtedly a signal had passed between the two, and Ted, not wishing to be an eavesdropper, looked away again.  But in the swift glance he had given the young girl—­for now he saw that she was little else—­he made a mental note of her.  The gray eyes with the long, dark lashes, the oval face, beautiful in shape and of an ivory tint; the scarlet, curving lips, the slender, trim figure, and the strange, subtle perfume which she exhaled, one would never forget.

He also noted the appearance of the man who had signaled the girl.

The man was five feet seven inches in height; his face was well rounded, but not too fat.  He had a brown, pointed beard; the eyes were pale, almost colorless; the forehead, broad and high, a fact which Ted noted when the man lifted his hat to wipe his brow.  He had the air of a well-bred man of the world, and was probably a resident of New York.  There was something familiar about the man that made Ted think that he had seen him before.

Ted saw Bud come through the door into the waiting room from the midway of the station, look up and wave his hand, with a frown and a shake of the head that told him his pard’s quest for the missing baggage had been fruitless.

At the same time, the girl at his side seemed to bump into him, and as he turned to her she muttered an apology and hurried away.  Although he followed her with his eyes a few moments, she was soon lost in the crowd.

He slipped his hands into the pockets of his jacket, and, with his back to the railing, prepared to wait until Bud reached him.

As his left hand sank into his pocket, his fingers came in contact with a piece of paper.

He knew that he had not placed the paper in his pocket, and glanced around with his usual caution to see if any one was watching him.  He saw that wonderful pair of gray eyes with the dark lashes—­Irish eyes, he called them—­watching him over the shoulders of a man a dozen feet away in the crowd.  But the moment the woman realized that she was being observed, she disappeared.

“Deuced strange,” he muttered to himself, fumbling with the paper, which he had not withdrawn from his pocket.  “That girl placed this paper in my pocket.  I wonder why.  There is something out of the way here, for the paper was not there before she stood beside me.”

One less wise than Ted, and not so modest, might have thought that the girl was trying to flirt with him.  But to Ted there was something more important and mysterious than that in her actions.

If he read them aright, she had placed the paper in his pocket when she apparently accidentally bumped into him, and had gone away only to come back to see if he had discovered it.

Although he searched the crowd with eager eyes, he did not see her again, and was confident that she had disappeared as soon as she had accomplished her mission, which was to convey some message to him.