he added, but his arms hid his mouth as he thrust them into his greatcoat, preparing to move away. He went alone; and the other, after a moment’s gloomy meditation, gathered up coat and bag and followed. During that moment of arrested decision, however, his features had dropped into sinister lines which the colonel remembered.

“Dangerous customer, or I miss my guess,” mused the soldier, who knew the passions of men. “I wonder—they couldn’t mean my Aunt Rebecca? She’s old; she has millions of money—but she’s not on this train. And there’s no Miss Smith in our deck. I’m so used to plotting I go off on fake hikes! Probably I’m getting old and dotty. Mercer, poor fellow, may have his brain turned and be an anarchist or a bomb-thrower or a dirty kidnapper for revenge; but that boy’s a decent chap; I’ve licked too many second lieutenants into shape not to know something of youngsters.”

“By the way what is the penalty for kidnapping?” Page 16

[17]He pushed the idea away; or, rather, his own problems pushed it out of his mind, which went back to his ward and his single living brother. Melville had no children, only his wife’s daughters, who were both married—Melville having married a widow with a family, an estate and a mind of her own. Melville was a professor in a state university, a mild, learned man whom nature intended for science but whom his wife was determined to make into the president of the university.

[17]

“Even money which will win,” chuckled Rupert Winter to himself. “Millicent hasn’t much tact; but she has the perseverance of the saints. She married Mel; he doesn’t know, but she surely did. And she bosses him now. Well, I suppose Mel likes to be bossed; he never had any strenuous opinions except about the canals of Mars—Valgame dios!”

With a gasp the colonel sprang to his feet. There before him, in the flesh, was his sister-in-law. Her stately figure, her Roman profile, her gracefully gesticulating hand, which indicated the colonel’s position to her heavily laden attendant, a lad in blue—these he knew by heart just as he knew that her toilet for the journey would be in[18] the latest mode, and that she would have the latest fashion of gait and mien. Millicent studied such things.

[18]

She waved her luggage into place—an excellent place—in the same breath dismissing the porter and instructing him when he must return. Then, but not until then, did she turn 

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