I'm not sorry." 

 He made no answer. They walked as far as the rear of the train, turned and came back before she spoke again: 

 "What is it they are doing to the front of our train, Mr. Eaton?" 

 He looked.  "They are putting a plow on the engine." 

 "Oh!" 

 "That seems to be only the ordinary push-plow, but if what I have been overhearing is correct, the railroad people are preparing to give you one of the minor exhibitions of that everyday courage of which you spoke this morning, Miss Dorne." 

 "In what particular way?" 

 "When we get across the Idaho line and into the mountains, you are to ride behind a double-header driving a rotary snow-plow." 

 "A double-header? You mean two locomotives?" 

 "Yes; the preparation is warrant that what is ahead of us in the way of travel will fully come up to anything you may have been led to expect." They stood a minute watching the trainmen; as they turned, his gaze went past her to the rear cars.  "Also," he added, "Mr. Avery, with his usual gracious pleasure at my being in your company, is hailing you from the platform of your car." 

 She looked up at Eaton sharply, seemed about to speak, and then checked what was upon her tongue.  "You are going into your own car?"  She held out to him her small gloved hand.  "Good-by, then—until we see one another again." 

 "Good night, Miss Dorne." 

 He took her hand and retaining it hardly the fraction of an instant, let it go. Was it her friendship she had been offering him? Men use badinage without respect to what their actual feelings may be; women—some memory from the past in which he had known such girls as this, seemed to recall—use it most frequently when their feelings, consciously or unconsciously, are drawing toward a man. 

 Eaton now went into the men's compartment of his car, where he sat smoking till after the train was under way again. The porter looked in upon him there to ask if he wished his berth made up now; Eaton nodded assent, and fifteen minutes later, dropping 

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