I gave my promise, of course.  Again, when we were almost into Baltimore, she asked to examine the gun-metal cigarette case, and sat silent with it in her hands, while I told of the early morning’s events on the Ontario.

“So you see,” I finished, “this grip, everything I have on, belongs to a fellow named Sullivan.  He probably left the train before the wreck,—­perhaps just after the murder.”

“And so—­you think he committed the—­the crime?” Her eyes were on the cigarette case.

“Naturally,” I said.  “A man doesn’t jump off a Pullman car in the middle of the night in another man’s clothes, unless he is trying to get away from something.  Besides the dirk, there were the stains that you, saw.  Why, I have the murdered man’s pocket-book in this valise at my feet.  What does that look like?”

I colored when I saw the ghost of a smile hovering around the corners of her mouth.  “That is,” I finished, “if you care to believe that I am innocent.”

The sustaining chain of her small gold bag gave way just then.  She did not notice it.  I picked it up and slid the trinket into my pocket for safekeeping, where I promptly forgot it.  Afterwards I wished I had let it lie unnoticed on the floor of that dirty little suburban car, and even now, when I see a woman carelessly dangling a similar feminine trinket, I shudder involuntarily:  there comes back to me the memory of a girl’s puzzled eyes under the brim of a flopping hat, the haunting suspicion of the sleepless nights that followed.

Just then I was determined that my companion should not stray back to the wreck, and to that end I was determinedly facetious.

“Do you know that it is Sunday?” she asked suddenly, “and that we are actually ragged?”

“Never mind that,” I retorted.  “All Baltimore is divided on Sunday into three parts, those who rise up and go to church, those who rise up and read the newspapers, and those who don’t rise up.  The first are somewhere between the creed and the sermon, and we need not worry about the others.”

“You treat me like a child,” she said almost pettishly.  “Don’t try so hard to be cheerful.  It—­it is almost ghastly.”

After that I subsided like a pricked balloon, and the remainder of the ride was made in silence.  The information that she would go to friends in the city was a shock:  it meant an earlier separation than I had planned for.  But my arm was beginning again.  In putting her into a cab I struck it and gritted my teeth with the pain.  It was probably for that reason that I forgot the gold bag.

She leaned forward and held out her hand.  “I may not have another chance to thank you,” she said, “and I think I would better not try, anyhow.  I cannot tell you how grateful I am.”  I muttered something about the gratitude being mine:  owing to the knock I was seeing two cabs, and two girls were holding out two hands.