This she is doing while Lawrence is looking at her. Her appearance makes him sigh. Not that she isn't as beautiful as when he last saw her, for she is more lovely, only so much more ethereal. Her eyes are too brilliant, and there is a little apprehension in them, and a few lines of pain on her face, some of which, Harry has a wild hope, are perhaps caused by him; though he grieves over them just the same.
As she comes out of Wells, Fargo's, having finished her business with the express company—which has taken some five minutes, the transaction being a heavy one, and the receipt very formal—Lawrence, with rapture in his heart, and love in his eye, approaches to speak to his divinity, and to his intense chagrin, gets the very neatest kind of a cut. The girl looks him straight in the face—with haughty eyes that never flinch, though there is no recognition in them.
So passing on her way, she buys her tickets, and makes arrangements for her sleeping-car.
This catastrophe has been brought about as follows: While standing waiting for the receipt from Wells, Fargo & Co., Erma has caught the conversation of two men who are standing just outside its door.
One of them says: "Who is she?" for Miss Travenion's beauty has attracted his attention.
The other, a mining man who has seen her with the bishop in Eureka, answers: "Tranyon the boss Mormon's daughter."
"Impossible!"
"Fact, I assure you," laughs the second man. "From the airs she puts on, you'd think she was a New York or St. Louis belle. But I believe she's booked for the seventh wife of old Kruger. These Mormon girls have no brains! I guess readin', writin', an' 'rithmetic's about the extent of her education."
This decidedly slurring description of the belle of Newport's last season makes the girl think every one despises her; and seeing Lawrence, and remembering his desertion, she sighs: "He despises me also—but he shall never show it to me—never!" And so passes him as if she had never seen him.
Striving to eat, but finding she has no appetite, Erma goes almost timidly to the train, where she has engaged a stateroom, for she thinks the whole world is talking about her father and herself, in about the same language she has heard, and shrinks from public gaze and public scoff. She is happy to get to the privacy of her stateroom unnoticed—which is not difficult, every one about the station being excited and busy.