The first east-bound express that left New York the following morning carried in one of its Pullmans a famous surgeon and his assistant, bound for New Bethel.

In the murk of the smoker ahead was a third passenger whose ticket bore the name of the same city--a bearded man with rounded shoulders and tired eyes, whose clothes betrayed a foreign origin.
This was Paul Spencer on the last stage of his journey home.
Until the train drew out of the station, the seat by his side was unoccupied.

But then another foreign looking passenger entered and made his way up the aisle.
You have probably noticed how some instinctive law of selection seems to guide us in choosing our companion in a car where all the window seats are taken.

The newcomer passed a number of empty places and sat down by the side of Paul.

He was tall, blonde, with dusty looking eyebrows and a beard that was nearly the colour of dead grass.
"Russian, I guess," thought Paul, "and probably thinks I am something of the same." The reflection pleased him.
"If that's the way I look to him, nobody else is going to guess." When the conductor came, Paul's seat-mate tried to ask if he would have to change cars before reaching his destination, but his language was so broken that he couldn't make himself understood.
"I thought he was Russian," Paul nodded to himself, catching a word here and there; and, aloud, he quietly added in his mother's tongue, "It's all right, batuchka; you don't have to change." The other gave him a grateful glance, and soon they were talking together.
"A Bolshevist," thought Paul, recognizing now and then a phrase or an argument which he had heard from some of his friends in Rio, "but what's he going to New Bethel for ?" As the train drew nearer the place of his birth, Paul grew quieter.