CHAPTER XI

A CHANCE RENCOUNTER

While Mrs. Temple was confiding to her husband that the agitated couple in the next seat had just come from a wedding-factory, and had got on while he was lost in tobacco land, the people in the seat on the other side of them were engaged in a little drama of their own.

Ira Lathrop, known to all who knew him as a woman-hating snapping-turtle, was so busily engaged trying to drag the farthest invading rice grains out of the back of his neck, that he was late in realizing his whereabouts. When he raised his head, he found that he had crowded into a seat with an uncomfortable looking woman, who crowded against the window with old-maidenly timidity.

He felt some apology to be necessary, and he snarled: "Disgusting things, these weddings!" After he heard this, it did not sound entirely felicitous, so he grudgingly ventured: "Excuse me--you married?"

She denied the soft impeachment so heartily that he softened a little:

"You're a sensible woman. I guess you and I are the only sensible people on this train."

"It--seems--so," she giggled. It was the first time her spinstership had been taken as material for a compliment. Something in the girlish giggle and the strangely young smile that swept twenty years from her face and belied the silver lines in her hair, seemed to catch the old bachelor's attention. He stared at her so fiercely that she looked about for a way of escape. Then a curiously anxious, almost a hungry, look softened his leonine jowls into a boyish eagerness, and his growl became a sort of gruff purr:

"Say, you look something like an old sweetheart--er--friend--of mine. Were you ever in Brattleboro, Vermont?"

A flush warmed her cheek, and a sense of home warmed her prim speech, as she confessed:

"I came from there originally."

"So did I," said Ira Lathrop, leaning closer, and beaming like a big sun: "I don't suppose you remember Ira Lathrop?"

The old maid stared at the bachelor as if she were trying to see the boy she had known, through the mask that time had modeled on his face. And then she was a girl again, and her voice chimed as she cried:

"Why, Ira!--Mr. Lathrop!--is it you?"

She gave him her hand--both her hands, and he smothered them in one big paw and laid the other on for extra warmth, as he nodded his savage head and roared as gentle as a sucking dove:

"Well, well! Annie--Anne--Miss Gattle! What do you think of that?"

They gossiped across the chasm of years about people and things, and knew nothing of the excitement so close to them, saw nothing of Chicago slipping back into the distance, with its many lights shooting across the windows like hurled torches.

Suddenly a twinge of ancient jealousy shot through the man's heart, recurring to old emotions.

"So you're not married, Annie. Whatever became of that fellow who used to hang round you all the time?"

"Charlie Selby?" She blushed at the name, and thrilled at the luxury of meeting jealousy. "Oh, he entered the church. He's a minister out in Ogden, Utah."

"I always knew he'd never amount to much," was Lathrop's epitaph on his old rival. Then he started with a new twinge: "You bound for Ogden, too?"

"Oh, no," she smiled, enraptured at the new sensation of making a man anxious, and understanding all in a flash the motives that make coquettes. Then she told him her destination. "I'm on my way to China."

"China!" he exclaimed. "So'm I!"

She stared at him with a new thought, and gushed: "Oh, Ira--are you a missionary, too?"

"Missionary? Hell, no!" he roared. "Excuse me--I'm an importer--Anne, I--I----"

But the sonorous swear reverberated in their ears like a smitten bell, and he blushed for it, but could not recall it.