But Virginia read momentous things in his face and eyes, and when the time was fully ripe she cornered him. It was the old story over again, of a woman's determination to know pitted against a truthful man's blundering efforts to conceal; and before he knew what he was about Calvert had betrayed the Rajah's secret—which was also the secret of the cipher telegrams.
Miss Carteret said little—said nothing, indeed, that an anxious kinsman lover could lay hold of. But when the secret was hers she donned coat and headgear and went out on the square-railed platform, whither the Reverend Billy dared not follow her.
But another member of the Rosemary group had more courage—-or fewer scruples. When Miss Carteret let herself out of the rear door, Jastrow disappeared in the opposite direction, passing through the forward vestibule and dropping cat-like from the step to inch his way silently over the treacherous snow-crust to a convenient spying place at the other end of the car.
Unfortunately for the spying purpose, the shades were drawn behind the two great windows and the glass door, but the starlight sufficed to show the watcher a shadowy Miss Virginia standing motionless on the side which gave her an outlook down the canyon, leaning out, it might be, to anticipate the upcoming of some one from the construction camp below.
The secretary, shivering in the knife-like wind slipping down from the bald peaks, had not long to wait. By the time his eyes were fitted to the darkness he heard a man coming up the track, the snow crunching frostily under his steady stride. Jastrow ducked under the platform and gained a viewpoint on the other side of the car. The crunching footfalls had ceased, and a man was swinging himself up to the forward step of the Rosemary. At the instant a voice just above the spy's head called softly, “Mr. Winton!” and the new-comer dropped back into the snow and came tramping to the rear.
It was an awkward moment for Jastrow; but he made shift to dodge again, and so to be out of the way when the engineer drew himself up and climbed the hand-rail to stand beside his summoner.
The secretary saw him take her hand and heard her exclamation, half indignant, wholly reproachful:
“You had my note: I told you not to come!”
“So you did, and yet you were expecting me,” he asserted. He was still holding her hand, and she could not—or did not—withdraw it.
“Was I, indeed!” There was a touch of the old-time raillery in the words, but it was gone when she added: “Oh, why will you keep on coming and coming when you know so well what it means to you and your work?”