And yet—­such is the uncertainty of feminine temperament—­Mrs. Rayner was no more incensed at the commercial “gent” because he had obtruded his attentions than she was at the young man reading in his own section because he had refrained.  Nearly twenty-four hours had elapsed since they crossed the Missouri, and in all that time not once had she detected in him a glance that betrayed the faintest interest in her, or—­still more remarkable—­in the unquestionably lovely girl at her side.  Intrusiveness she might resent, but indifference she would and did.  Who was this youth, she wondered, who not once had so much as stolen a look at the sweet, bonny face of her maiden sister?  Surely ’twas a face any man would love to gaze upon,—­so fair, so exquisite in contour and feature, so pearly in complexion, so lovely in the deep, dark brown of its shaded eyes.

The bold glances of the four card-players she had defiantly returned, and vanquished.  Those men, like the travelling gents, were creatures of coarser mould; but her experienced eye told her the solitary occupant of the opposite section was a gentleman.  The clear cut of his pale features, the white, slender hand and shapely foot, the style and finish of his quiet travelling-dress, the soft modulation and refined tone of his voice on the one occasion when she heard him reply to some importunity of the train-boy with his endless round of equally questionable figs and fiction, the book he was reading,—­a volume of Emerson,—­all combined to speak of a culture and position equal to her own.  She had been over the trans-continental railways often enough to know that it was permissible for gentlemen to render their fellow-passengers some slight attention which would lead to mutual introductions if desirable; and this man refused to see that the opportunity was open to him.

True, when first she took her survey of those who were to be her fellow-travellers at the “transfer” on the Missouri, she decided that here was one against whom it would be necessary to guard the approaches.  She had good and sufficient reasons for wanting no young man as attractive in appearance as this one making himself interesting to pretty Nellie on their journey.  She had already decided what Nellie’s future was to be.  Never, indeed, would she have taken her to the gay frontier station whither she was now en route, had not that future been already settled to her satisfaction.  Nellie Travers, barely out of school, was betrothed, and willingly so, to the man she, her devoted elder sister, had especially chosen.  Rare and most unlikely of conditions! she had apparently fallen in love with the man picked out for her by somebody else.  She was engaged to Mrs. Rayner’s fascinating friend Mr. Steven Van Antwerp, a scion of an old and esteemed and wealthy family; and Mr. Van Antwerp, who had been educated abroad, and had a Heidelberg scar on his left cheek, and dark, lustrous eyes, and wavy hair,—­almost raven,—­was a devoted lover, though fully fifteen years Miss Nellie’s senior.