Horror checked her. "Dead?"
"Yes. I did not want you to know this. Your sister is easily shocked——"
She paused a moment. "You are very thoughtful of Marie. Have you a sister?"
"I haven't. Why do you ask?"
"Who taught you thoughtfulness?" she asked, gravely. He stood disconcerted. "I find consideration common among Western men," she went on, generalizing prettily; "our men don't have it. Does a life so rough and terrible as this give men the consideration that we expect elsewhere and do not find? Ah, that poor shoveller. Isn't it horrible to die so? Did everyone else escape?"
"They are ready to start, I think," he suggested, uneasily.
"Oh, are they?"
"You are coming to see us?" called Marie, leaning from the top, while Glover paused behind her sister, when they had reached the stage. He stood with his hat in his hand. The dazzling sun made copper of the swarthy brown of his lower face and brought out the white of his forehead where the hair crisped wet in the heat of the morning. Gertrude Brock, after she had gained her seat with his help, looked down while he talked; looked at the top of his head, and listening vaguely to Marie, noted his long, bony hand as it clung to the window strap—the hand of the most audacious man she had ever met in her life—who had made an avowal to her on the observation platform of her father's own car—and she mused at the explosion that would have followed had she ever breathed a syllable of the circumstance to her own fiery papa.
But she had told no one—least of all, the young man that had asked her before she left Pittsburg to marry him and was now writing her every other day—Allen Harrison. Indeed, what could be more ridiculously embarrassing than to be assailed so unexpectedly? She had no mind to make herself anyone's laughing-stock by speaking of it. One thing, however, she had vaguely determined—since Glover had frightened her she would retaliate at least a little before she returned to the quiet of Fifth Avenue.
Marie was still talking to him. "Why haven't you heard? I thought sister would have told you. The doctor says I gained faster here than anywhere between the two oceans, and we are all to spend six weeks up at Glen Tarn Springs. Papa is going East and coming back after us, and we shall expect you to come to the Springs very often."