"Then where would the Mr. Westangular part more probably be found?"

"Oh, in Montana or Mesopotamia, or any of those places. Don't you know
about him? How ignorant literary people can be! Why, he was the
Amalgamated Clothespin. You haven't heard of that?"

She went on to tell him, with gay digressions, about the invention which
enabled Westangle to buy up the other clothes-pins and merge them in his
own--to become a commercial octopus, clutching the throats of other
clothespin inventors in the tentacles of the Westangle pin. "But he
isn't in clothespins now. He's in mines, and banks, and steamboats, and
railroads, and I don't know what all; and Mrs. Westangle, the second of
her name, never was in clothespins."

Miss Macroyd laughed all through her talk, and she was in a final burst
of laughing when the train slowed into Stamford. There a girl came into
the car trailing her skirts with a sort of vivid debility and overturning
some minor pieces of hand-baggage which her draperies swept out of their
shelter beside the chairs. She had to take one of the seats which back
against the wall of the state-room, where she must face the whole length
of the car. She sat weakly fallen back in the chair and motionless, as
if almost unconscious; but after the train had begun to stir she started
up, and with a quick flinging of her veil aside turned to look out of the
window. In the flying instant Verrian saw a colorless face with pinched
and sunken eyes under a worn-looking forehead, and a withered mouth whose
lips parted feebly.

On her part, Miss Macroyd had doubtless already noted that the girl was,
with no show of expensiveness, authoritatively well gowned and personally