For that first moment there was nothing but joy at the sight of her.  McKnight’s touch on my arm brought me back to reality.

“Come over and meet them,” he said.  “That’s the cousin Miss West is visiting, Mrs. Dallas.”

But I would not go.  After he went I sat there alone, painfully conscious that I was being pointed out and stared at from the box.  The abominable Japanese gave way to yet more atrocious performing dogs.

“How many offers of marriage will the young lady in the box have?” The dog stopped sagely at ‘none,’ and then pulled out a card that said eight.  Wild shouts of glee by the audience.  “The fools,” I muttered.

After a little I glanced over.  Mrs. Dallas was talking to McKnight, but She was looking straight at me.  She was flushed, but more calm than I, and she did not bow.  I fumbled for my hat, but the next moment I saw that they were going, and I sat still.  When McKnight came back he was triumphant.

“I’ve made an engagement for you,” he said.  “Mrs. Dallas asked me to bring you to dinner to-night, and I said I knew you would fall all over yourself to go.  You are requested to bring along the broken arm, and any other souvenirs of the wreck that you may possess.”

“I’ll do nothing of the sort,” I declared, struggling against my inclination.  “I can’t even tie my necktie, and I have to have my food cut for me.”

“Oh, that’s all right,” he said easily.  “I’ll send Stogie over to fix you up, and Mrs. Dal knows all about the arm.  I told her.”

(Stogie is his Japanese factotum, so called because he is lean, a yellowish brown in color, and because he claims to have been shipped into this country in a box.)

The Cinematograph was finishing the program.  The house was dark and the music had stopped, as it does in the circus just before somebody risks his neck at so much a neck in the Dip of Death, or the hundred-foot dive.  Then, with a sort of shock, I saw on the white curtain the announcement: 

The next picture

Is the doomed Washington flier, taken A short distance from the scene of the wreck on the fatal morning of September tenth.  Two miles farther on it met with almost complete annihilation.

I confess to a return of some of the sickening sensations of the wreck; people around me were leaning forward with tense faces.  Then the letters were gone, and I saw a long level stretch of track, even the broken stone between the ties standing out distinctly.  Far off under a cloud of smoke a small object was rushing toward us and growing larger as it came.

Now it was on us, a mammoth in size, with huge drivers and a colossal tender.  The engine leaped aside, as if just in time to save us from destruction, with a glimpse of a stooping fireman and a grimy engineer.  The long train of sleepers followed.  From a forward vestibule a porter in a white coat waved his hand.  The rest of the cars seemed still wrapped in slumber.  With mixed sensations I saw my own car, Ontario, fly past, and then I rose to my feet and gripped McKnight’s shoulder.