The milk-train was about an hour overdue, which would make it about due in the South. Green seated himself on a wooden bench and folded his hands over the silver crook of his walking-stick. The situation was now perfectly clear to him. She had come down from her room, and had seen his name on the register, had been seized by a terrible panic, and had fled.
Had he been alone and un.o.bserved, he might have attempted to knock his brains out with his walking-stick. He desired to, earnestly, when he realised what an a.s.s he had been to sign the register.
She had begun to pace the platform, nervously, halting and leaning forward from time to time to scan impatiently the long, glittering perspective of the metals.
It had begun to grow dusk. Lanterns on switches and semaph.o.r.es flashed out red, green, blue, white, stringing their jewelled sparks far away into the distance.
To and fro she paced the empty platform, pa.s.sing and repa.s.sing him. And he began to notice presently that she looked at him rather intently each time.
He wondered whether she suspected his ident.i.ty. Guiltless of anything that he could remember having done, nevertheless he shivered guiltily every time she glanced at him.
Then the unexpected happened; and he fairly shook in his shoes as she marched deliberately up to him.
"I beg your pardon," she said in a very sweet and anxious voice, "but might I ask if you happen to be going to Ormond?"
He was on his feet, hat in hand, by this time; his heart and pulses badly stampeded; but he managed to answer calmly that he was going to Ormond.
"There is only a milk-train, I understand," she said.
"So I understand."
"Do you think there will be any difficulty in my obtaining permission to travel on it? The station-master says that permission is not given to ladies unaccompanied."
She looked at him almost imploringly.
"I really must go on that train," she said in a low voice. "It is desperately necessary. Could you--could you manage to arrange it for me?
I would be so grateful!--so deeply grateful!"
"I"ll do what I can," said that unimaginative man. "Probably bribery can fix it----"
"There might be--if--if--you would be willing--if you didn"t object--I know it sounds very strange--but my case is so desperate----" She checked herself, flushing a delicate pink. And he waited.
Then, very resolutely she looked up at him:
"Would you--could you p-pretend that I am--am--your sister?"
"Certainly," he said. An immense happiness seized him. He was not only up to his neck in Romance. It was already over his head, and he was out of his depth, and swimming.
"Certainly," he repeated quietly, controlling his joy by a supreme effort. "That would be the simplest way out of it, after all."
She said earnestly, almost solemnly: "If you will do this generous thing for--for a stranger--in very deep perplexity and trouble--that stranger will remain in your debt while life lasts!"
She had not intended to be dramatic; she may not have thought she was; but the tears again glimmered in her lovely eyes, and the situation seemed tense enough to George Z. Green.
Moreover, he felt that complications already were arising--complications which he had often read of and sometimes dreamed of. Because, as he stood there in the southern dusk, looking at this slim, young girl, he began to realise that never before in all his life had he gazed upon anything half as beautiful.
Very far away a locomotive whistled: they both turned, and saw the distant headlight glittering on the horizon like a tiny star.
"W-would it be best for us to t-take your name or mine--in case they ask us?" she stammered, flushing deeply.
"Perhaps," he said pleasantly, "you might be more likely to remember yours in an emergency."
"I think so," she said navely; "it is rather difficult for me to deceive anybody. My name is Marie Wiltz."
"Then I am Mr. Wiltz, your brother, for an hour or two."
"If you please," she murmured.
It had been on the tip of his tongue to add, "Mr. George Z. Wiltz," but he managed to check himself.
The great, lumbering train came rolling in; the station agent looked very sharply through his spectacles at Miss Wiltz when he saw her with Green, but being a Southerner, he gallantly a.s.sumed that it was all right.
One of the train crew placed two wooden chairs for them in the partly empty baggage car; and there they sat, side by side, while the big, heavy milk cans were loaded aboard, and a few parcels shoved into their car. Then the locomotive tooted leisurely; there came a jolt, a resonant clash; and the train was under way.
XXIV
For a while the baggage master fussed about the car, sorting out packages for Ormond; then, courteously inquiring whether he could do anything for them, and learning that he could not, he went forward into his own den, leaving Marie Wiltz and George Z. Green alone in a baggage car dimly illumined by a small and smoky lamp.
Being well-bred young people, they broke the tension of the situation gracefully and naturally, pretending to find it amusing to travel in a milk train to a fashionable southern resort.
And now that the train was actually under way and speeding southward through the night, her relief from anxiety was very plain to him. He could see her relax; see the frightened and hunted look in her eyes die out, the natural and delicious colour return to her cheeks.
As they conversed with amiable circ.u.mspection and pleasant formality, he looked at her whenever he dared without seeming to be impertinent; and he discovered that the face she had worn since he had first seen her was not her natural expression; that her features in repose or in fearless animation were winning and almost gay.
She had a delightful mouth, sweet and humourous; a delicate nose and chin, and two very blue and beautiful eyes that looked at him at moments so confidently, so engagingly, that the knowledge of what her expression would be if she knew who he was smote him at moments, chilling his very marrow.
What an astonishing situation! How he would have scorned a short story with such a situation in it! And he thought of Williams--poor old Williams!--and mentally begged his pardon.
For he understood now that real life was far stranger than fiction. He realised at last that Romance loitered ever around the corner; that Opportunity was always gently nudging one"s elbow.
There lay his overcoat on the floor, trailing over her satchel. He looked at it so fixedly that she noticed the direction of his gaze, glanced down, blushed furiously.
"It may seem odd to you that I am travelling with a man"s overcoat," she said, "but it will seem odder yet when I tell you that I don"t know how I came by it."
"That _is_ odd," he admitted smilingly. "To whom does it belong?"
Her features betrayed the complicated emotions that successively possessed her--perplexity, anxiety, bashfulness.
After a moment she said in a low voice: "You have done so much for me already--you have been so exceedingly nice to me--that I hesitate to ask of you anything more----"
"Please ask!" he urged. "It will be really a happiness for me to serve you."
Surprised at his earnestness and the unembarra.s.sed warmth of his reply, she looked up at him gratefully after a moment.