Hoping that he was creating an impression of calmness, he lit a cigarette. She raised her face to his with a softness in her eyes that he had never noticed.
"If it is," she pleaded, clutching at his hands, "swear you hadn't the least idea who I really am. Disown me. Act as though my arrest had come to you as an utter shock."
He seated himself beside her. "But, my dear Santa, that wouldn't help you."
"Help me! Of course not," she agreed with rapid vehemence. "If I'm caught, I'm beyond helping. It's of you I'm thinking--you, with your generosity and your splendid plans. If I dragged you down, as I dragged down all the others, my heart would break. I never meant you any harm. You do believe me?"
"Say you know that I've loved you," she urged. And, when he hesitated, "Quickly. Time's running short. Let me hear you say just once, 'Santa, I know that you've loved me.'"
"You wouldn't kiss me?" She asked the question scarcely above her breath. "There've been so many who paid to kiss me. You wouldn't give me the best, that would be the last?"
Minutes dragged by like hours. Every sound was magnified into something monstrous. A dozen times they imagined they heard police clearing the corridor, preparatory to bursting in the door. What they heard was only newly-arrived passengers and porters disposing of their baggage. At last suspense became its own anesthetic.
"Did he tell you his destination?" Hindwood whispered.
"Why did you get into conversation with him?" Her lips scarcely moved. He had to listen acutely.
"I didn't. He pretended to have mistaken his compartment. I was crying. He saw."
"What did he say? I heard you laughing when I entered. How did he commence?"
"He said I was too beautiful to be unhappy--it's the way every man starts. Then he said that he'd recognized me, just as though he'd been looking for me always. And then he tortured me by wondering whether our paths had ever crossed."
"Never--unless he'd seen me in America." Hindwood fell silent. Without warning he leaped to his feet. Before he could escape, she was clinging to him.
"I'm not." He freed himself from her grasp. "If I've guessed right, you won't have to face them." With that he was gone.
A quarter of an hour elapsed: he had not returned. Nothing that she dreaded had happened. With a lurch the train jerked forward. Farewells were being shouted. Station-lamps streamed past, the scarcer lights of freight-yards, then at last the glow-worm warmth of a city under darkness.