Mary Dunlap decided that they were newly wed. The man had an air of proprietorship which she thought could only be explained by that relation. To the girl everything seemed to be strange and new, but she did not wear a happy face.
"Poor child!" thought the watcher. "She has just said goodbye to her mother, I suppose."
Then for a moment, memory carried her swiftly back to the day when she had been called upon to bid one dear girl the long goodbye.
Still, she reflected, on this girl's face there was unrest—real anxiety. There were even moments when she fancied that there was actual fear! What could be the explanation?
The husband had been most attentive, almost oppressively so. Could he be urging her to some course she did not approve?
"The man looks like a gentleman tyrant!" she told herself. "He will be certain to have his own way in the end. That poor child might as well yield first as last."
The call for dinner in the dining car took her away from their vicinity for a little while, and before she returned they had followed her to the diner. But later in the evening when they came back to their seats, she could not help seeing that they were having some kind of a heated argument, and that the girl was deeply distressed, almost on the verge of tears, the man alternately vexed and cajoling.
Mary Dunlap was a woman of wide interests and keen insight into character. She could not help siding with the young wife, and feeling that the man was in the wrong. He looked like a man who would have his own way at all costs.
In vain did she tell herself that she was probably all wrong. The girl might be a spoiled darling who was childishly insisting on some extravagance which the man, older and wiser, was trying to reason her out of. But try as she would, she could not make it seem that way. The man had a selfish sophistication about him that made her distrust him.
Both the young people were well dressed, with that regard to quiet elegance that showed they had plenty of money, and belonged to what is known as the higher social class. The trouble could not be about money.