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146 Avery, studying his cribbage hand, pretended not to notice he was passing. So Avery admitted too that affairs were turning toward the better, just now at least, for Eaton. When he was again in his compartment, no one came to lock him in. The porter who brought his breakfast a few minutes later, apologized for its lateness, saying it had had to be brought from a club car on the next track, whither the others in the car, except Santoine, had gone.

Eaton had barely finished with this tardy breakfast when a bumping against the car told him that it was being coupled to a train. The new train started, and now the track followed the Mississippi River. Eaton, looking forward from his window as the train rounded curves, saw that the Santoine car was now the last one of a train—presumably bound from Minneapolis to Chicago.

South they went, through Minnesota and Wisconsin, and the weather grew warmer and the spring further advanced. The snow was quite cleared from the ground, and the willows beside the ditches in the fields were beginning to show green sprouts. At nine o'clock in the evening, some minutes after crossing the state line into Illinois, the train stopped at a station where the last car was cut off.

A motor-ambulance and other limousine motor-cars were waiting in the light from the station. Eaton, seated at the window, saw Santoine carried out on a stretcher and put into the ambulance. Harriet Santoine, after giving a direction to a man who apparently was a chauffeur, got into the ambulance with her father. The surgeon and the nurses rode with them. They drove off. Avery entered another automobile, which