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136 "Mr. Santoine is here, then?"

"Here? Of course he's here."

"And he's conscious?"

"He has been conscious for the better part of two days. Didn't they tell you?" Sinclair frowned. "I heard Miss Santoine send word to you by the conductor soon after her father first came to himself."

"You mean he will recover!"

"He would recover from any injury which was not inevitably fatal. He was in perfect physical condition, and I never have known a patient to grasp so completely the needs of his own case and to help the surgeon as much by his control of himself."

Eaton looked toward the window, breathing hard. "I heard the newsboys—"

Sinclair shrugged. "The papers print what they can get and in the way which seems most effective to them," was his only comment.

Eaton pulled himself together. So Santoine was neither dead nor dying. Therefore, at worst, the charge of murder would not be made; and at best—what? He was soon to find out; the papers evidently were entirely in error or falsely informed. Basil Santoine was still at the other end of the car, and his daughter would be with him there. But as Eaton followed Sinclair out of the compartment into the aisle, he halted a moment—the look of the car was so entirely different from what he had expected. A nurse in white uniform sat in one of the seats toward the middle of the car, sewing; another nurse, likewise clothed in white, had just come out from the drawing-room at the end of the car; Avery and Sinclair apparently had been playing cribbage, for Avery sat at a little table in the section which had been