[Illustration:  Eleanor was still sitting ... stiff and silent]

They came to their senses a moment later to find themselves held firmly by brawny peacemakers, the black cars rushing swiftly by without them.

Forgetting the battle so inopportunely begun, they started off madly in pursuit, shouting, yelling, commanding.  But the flyer was deaf to their cries, callous against their tears.  It whistled off into the north, carrying two trusting, nervous young women, who were secure in the belief that their liege lords to be were aboard, utterly unconscious of the true state of affairs.  In the drawing-room of Car 5 Eleanor was still sitting, with her veil down, her raincoat saturating the couch on which she sat stiff and silent.  Anne Courtenay in Car 7 was philosophically preparing for bed, absolutely confident that the Englishman she had loved for years was not going to fail her.

Windomshire, alas, came to grief in his useless pursuit.  He fell off the end of the platform and rolled in the mud, half stunned.  When he painfully picked himself up, he saw Dauntless sitting on the edge of the walk, his haggard, staring face lighted by the glare of a sympathetic lantern.  The station agent was offering vain but well-intended commiseration.

“Good God!” he heard Joe groan, but he did not catch the words, “she’s gone without me!”

The next instant the distracted eloper was on his feet demanding a special engine.

“I’ve got to have it!” he shouted.

Windomshire’s wits returned.  Why not have a special too?  It was the only way.

“You can order one for me, too,” he exclaimed.  “At once.  It’s imperative.”

CHAPTER III

THE MORNING AFTER

The sun was peeping over the hilltops and shooting his merry glance across the rain-soaked lowlands when Eleanor Thursdale awoke from her final snatch of slumber.  A hundred feverish lapses into restless subconsciousness had marked the passage of nearly as many miles of clatter and turmoil.  Never before had she known a train to be so noisy; never before had she lain awake long enough to make the natural discovery.  It seemed hours before she dropped off in the first surrender to sleep; it seemed hours between the succeeding falls.  Her brain and heart were waging the most relentless battle against peace and security.  She knew Joe Dauntless was but two cars ahead, and yet she wondered if were really there; she wondered and was troubled—­oh, so troubled.

Daylight was creeping in beneath the curtain of the window.  She stretched her fine, tired young body, and for the first time really felt like going to sleep.  The perversity of early morning!  Gradually it dawned upon her that the train was not moving; as far back as she could recall in her now wakeful spell it occurred to her that the cars had been standing still and that everything was as quiet as death.  She looked at her watch; it was six o’clock.