“Where to?” repeated the man at the window.
“San Francisco—two tickets,” said Keith.
“‘Two,’ did you say?” asked the man, looking up quickly at him and then glancing sideways at the radiant, laughing woman who had taken her place so confidently at Keith’s side.
Keith’s voice did not falter, nor did his eyes fall:
“Two.”
But the telegraph operator smiled to himself as he shoved the tickets across the window sill. To him, Keith was simply “Another one!” So, too, would the world judge him after he was gone.
Bayard Keith was no saint; but as he crossed to the cars in the waxing light of day-dawn, his countenance was transfigured by an indescribable look we do not expect to see—ever—on the face of mortal man.
“For her dear sake!” he whispered softly to himself, as he looked away to the reddening East—to the eastward where “she” was. “For the sake of the woman I love.”
And “greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”