The passengers drew a long breath, the reader closed his book, the lady lifted the edge of her veil and delicately wiped her forehead, over which a few damp tendrils of hair were clinging.

Even a distinguished-looking man who had sat as impenetrable and remote as a statue in one of the front seats moved and turned his abstracted face to the window.

His deeply tanned cheek and clearly cut features harmonized with the red dust that lay in the curves of his brown linen dust-cloak, and completed his resemblance to a bronze figure.

Yet it was Demorest, changed only in coloring.

Now, as five years ago, his abstraction had a certain quality which the most familiar stranger shrank from disturbing.
But in the general relaxation of relief the novel-reader addressed him.
"Well, we ain't far from Boomville now, and it's all down-grade the rest of the way.