"I've been doing pretty well lately," he said. "I came out here on a deal that involved about fifty thousand dollars. I closed it up just this morning—and the commission would just about buy us that little house we had planned once. Won't you let bygones be bygones, Hazie?"
"It might be possible, Jack," she answered slowly, "if it were not for the fact that you took the most effective means a man could have taken to kill every atom of affection I had for you. I don't feel bitter any more—I simply don't feel at all."
"But you will," he said eagerly. "Just give me a chance. I was a hot-headed, jealous fool, but I never will be again. Give me a chance, Hazel."
"You'll have to make your own chances," she said deliberately. "I refuse to bind myself in any way. Why should I put myself out to make you happy when you destroyed all the faith I had in you? You simply didn't trust me. You wouldn't trust me again. If slander could turn you against me once it might a second time. Besides, I don't care for you as a man wants a woman to care for him. And I don't think I'm going to care—except, perhaps, in a friendly way."
And with that Barrow had to be content.
He called for her the next day, and took her, with the Marshes, out for a launch ride, and otherwise devoted himself to being an agreeable cavalier. On the launch excursion it was settled definitely that Hazel should accompany them East. She had no preparations to make. The only thing she would like to have done—return Roaring Bill's surplus money—she could not do. She did not know how or where to reach him with a letter. So far as Granville was concerned, she could always leave it if she desired, and she was a trifle curious to know how all her friends would greet her now that the Bush mystery was cleared up and the legacy explained.
So that at dusk of the following day she and Loraine Marsh sat in a Pullman, flattening their noses against the car window, taking a last look at the environs of Vancouver as the train rolled through the outskirts of the city. Hazel told herself that she was going home. Barrow smiled friendly assurance over the seat.
Even so, she was restless, far from content. There was something lacking. She grew distrait, monosyllabic, sat for long intervals staring absently into the gloom beyond the windowpane. The Limited was ripping through forested land. She could see now and then tall treetops limned against the starlit sky. The ceaseless roar of the trucks and the buzz of conversation in the car irritated her. At half after eight she called the porter and had him arrange her section for the night. And she got into bed, thankful to be by herself, depressed without reason.
She slept for a time, her sleep broken into by morbid dreams, and eventually she wakened to find her eyes full of tears. She did not know why she should cry, but cry she did till her pillow grew moist—and the heavy feeling in her breast grew, if anything, more intense.
She raised on one elbow and looked out the window. The train slowed with a squealing of brakes and the hiss of escaping air to a station. On the signboard over the office window she read the name of the place and the notation: "Vancouver, 180 miles."