Page:Vance--The trey o hearts.djvu/71

Rh hundred fragments and scattered them from the window. But the fiendish wind whisked one small scrap back into the lap of the woman he loved. The silken lashes trembled, lifted slightly, disclosing the dark glimmer of questioning eyes. And as she clipped the scrap of card-board between thumb and forefinger, he silently took from her one corner of the Trey of Hearts.

She nodded acknowledgment of his dumb solicitude but made no direct comment.

"The Pullman agent at Portland wires that there are no reservations available on any New York train in the next thirty-six hours," he said with lowered voice. "We'll have to rest up overnight, I guess."

"Couldn't we catch the New York boat to-night?"

"No. It leaves before we get in."

She said, "Too bad," abstractedly, reclosed her eyes, and apparently lapsed anew into semi-somnolence, but without deceiving him who could well guess what poignant anxiety gnawed at her heart.

He could have ground his teeth in exasperation: the impish insolence of that warning. To think that this was America, this the twentieth century, and still a man could be hunted from pillar to post, haunted with threats, and that by a slip of a girl with the cunning of a madwoman, the heart of a thug, the face the beloved woman that sat beside him.