"That is all, Mr. Eaton," Santoine repeated.
Eaton started back to his compartment. As he turned, Harriet Santoine looked up at him and their eyes met; and her look confirmed to him what he had felt before—that her father, now taking control of the investigation of the attack upon himself, was not continuing it with prejudice or predisposed desire to damage Eaton, except as the evidence accused him. And her manner now told, even more plainly than Santoine's, that the blind man had viewed the evidence as far from conclusive against Eaton; and as Harriet showed that she was glad of that, Eaton realized how she must have taken his side against Avery in reporting to her father.
For Santoine must have depended entirely upon circumstances presented to him by Avery and Connery and her; and Eaton was very certain that Avery and Connery had accused him; so Harriet Santoine—it could only be she—had opposed them in his defense. The warmth of his gratitude to her for this suffused him as he bowed to her; she returned a frank, friendly little nod which brought back to him their brief companionship on the first day on the train.
And as Eaton went back to his compartment through the open car, Dr. Sinclair looked up at him, but Avery, studying his cribbage hand, pretended not to notice he was passing. So Avery admitted too that affairs were turning toward the better, just now at least, for Eaton. When he was again in his compartment, no one came to lock him in. The porter who brought his breakfast a few minutes later, apologized for its lateness, saying it had had to be brought from a club car on the next track, whither the others in the car, except Santoine, had gone.
Eaton had barely finished with this tardy breakfast when a bumping against the car told him that it was being coupled to a train. The new train started, and now the track followed the Mississippi River. Eaton, looking forward from his window as the train rounded curves, saw that the Santoine car was now the last one of a train—presumably bound from Minneapolis to Chicago.
South they went, through Minnesota and Wisconsin, and the weather grew warmer and the spring further advanced. The snow was quite cleared from the ground, and the willows beside the ditches in the fields were beginning to show green sprouts. At nine o'clock in the evening, some minutes after crossing the state line into Illinois, the train stopped at a station where the last car was cut off.
A motor-ambulance and other limousine motor-cars were waiting in the light from the station. Eaton, seated at the window, saw Santoine carried out on a stretcher and put into the ambulance. Harriet Santoine, after giving a direction to a man who apparently was a chauffeur, got into the ambulance with her father. The surgeon and the nurses rode with them. They drove off. Avery entered another automobile, which swiftly disappeared. Conductor Connery came for the last time to Eaton's door.
"Miss Santoine says you're to go with the man she's left here for you. Here's the things I took from you. The money's all there. Mr. Santoine says you've been his guest on this car."
Eaton received back his purse and bill-fold. He put them in his pocket without examining their contents. The porter appeared with his overcoat and hat. Eaton put them on and stepped out of the car. The conductor escorted him to a limousine car. "This is the gentleman," Connery said to the chauffeur to whom Harriet Santoine had spoken. The man opened the door of the limousine; another man, whom Eaton had not before seen, was seated in the car; Eaton stepped in. Connery extended his hand—"Good-by, sir."
"Good-by."