The gentleman put his hand in his pocket. "Oh no," said Trenholme, and
went out. But the more lively lady reopened the door behind him, and
threw a coin on the ground as he was descending.

By the sound it had made Trenholme found it, and saw by the light of the
passing car that it was an English shilling. When the train was gone he
stood a minute where it had carried him, some hundred feet from the
station, and watched it going on into the darkness.

Afterwards, when his companions had composed themselves to sleep, and he
lay sleepless, listening to all that could be heard in the silent night,
curiously enough it was not upon the exciting circumstances of the early
evening that he mused chiefly, but upon the people he had seen in the
night train.

A seemingly little thing has sometimes the power to change those
currents that set one way and another within a man, making him satisfied
or dissatisfied with this or that. By chance, as it seems, a song is
sung, a touch is given, a sight revealed, and man, like a harp hung to
the winds, is played upon, and the music is not that which he devises.
So it was that Trenholme's encounter in the dusty car with the beautiful
woman who had looked upon him so indifferently had struck a chord which
was like a plaintive sigh for some better purpose in life than he was
beating out of this rough existence. It was not a desire for greater
pleasure that her beauty had aroused in him, but a desire for nobler
action--such was the power of her face.

The night passed on; no footfall broke the silence. The passing train
was the only episode of his vigil.