Voice in the railroad wreck.

"And I sat down—and wrote the man a letter—I had his name and address, you know. And there—in a rather maddening moonlight night on the Caspian Sea—all the horrors and terrors of that other—Canadian night came back to me and swamped completely all the arid timidity and sleek conventionality that women like me are hidebound with all their lives, and I wrote him—that unknown, unvisualized, unimagined—man—the utterly free, utterly frank, utterly honest sort of letter that any brave soul would write any other brave soul—every day of the world—if there wasn't any flesh. It wasn't a love letter. It wasn't even a sentimental letter. Never mind what I told him. Never mind anything except that there, in that tropical night on a moonlit sea, I asked him to meet me here, in Boston, eight months afterward—on the same Boston-bound Canadian train—on this—the anniversary of our other tragic meeting."

"And you think he'll be at the station?" gasped the Traveling Salesman.

The Youngish Girl's answer was astonishingly tranquil. "I don't know, I'm sure," she said. "That part of it isn't my business. All I know is that I wrote the letter—and mailed it. It's Fate's move next."

"But maybe he never got the letter!" protested the Traveling Salesman, buckling frantically at the straps of his sample-case.

"Very likely," the Youngish Girl answered calmly. "And if he never got it, then Fate has surely settled everything perfectly definitely for me—that way. The only trouble with that would be," she added whimsically, "that an unanswered letter is always pretty much like an unhooked hook. Any kind of a gap is apt to be awkward, and the hook that doesn't catch in its own intended tissue is mighty apt to tear later at something you didn't want torn."

"I don't know anything about that," persisted the Traveling Salesman, brushing nervously at the cinders on his hat. "All I say is—maybe he's married."

"Well, that's all right," smiled the Youngish Girl. "Then Fate would have settled it all for me perfectly satisfactorily that way. I wouldn't mind at all his not being at the station. And I wouldn't mind at all his being married. And I wouldn't mind at all his turning out to be very, very old. None of those things, you see, would interfere in the slightest with the memory of the—Voice or the—chivalry of the broken hand. The only thing i'd mind, i tell you, would be to think that he really and truly was the man who was made for me—and i missed finding it out!—Oh, of course, I've worried myself sick these past few months thinking of the audacity of what I've done. I've got such a 'Sore Thought,' as you call it, that I'm almost ready to scream if anybody mentions the word 'indiscreet' in my presence. And yet, and yet—after all, it isn't as though I were reaching out into the darkness after an indefinite object. What I'm reaching out for is a light, so that I can tell exactly just what object is there. And, anyway," she quoted a little waveringly: