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"Absolutely necessary to see you. Take last train Victoria if you can catch it. If not, earliest morning, and answer me direct either way." "Reply paid?" said the girl. Mr. Buckton had just departed and the counter-clerk was at the sounder. There was no other representative of the public, and she had never yet, as it seemed to her, not even in the street or in the Park, been so alone with him.
What I can vouch for is the numbers of the rich! There are new ones every day, and they seem to get richer and richer. Oh, they do come up!" she cried, imitating for her private recreation she was sure it wouldn't reach Mr. Mudge the low intonation of the counter-clerk. "And where do they come from?" her companion candidly enquired. She had to think a moment; then she found something.
The counter-clerk had gone to his dinner; she herself was busy with arrears of postal jobs, in the midst of which she became aware that Captain Everard had apparently been in the shop a minute and that Mr. Buckton had already seized him.
Finally she saw him make a dash that might have been toward the nook where the forms were hung; and at this she suddenly felt that she couldn't keep it up. The counter-clerk had just taken a telegram from a slavey, and, to give herself something to cover her, she snatched it out of his hand. The gesture was so violent that he gave her in return an odd look, and she also perceived that Mr.
She literally fancied once or twice that, projected as he was toward his doom, her own eyes struck him, while the air roared in his ears, as the one pitying pair in the crowd. But how could he speak to her while she sat sandwiched there between the counter-clerk and the sounder?
It seemed that he feared to be recognized by the counter-clerk at the chief telegraph office. For over an hour I smoked reflectively. I confess that a curious ill-defined suspicion had arisen in my mind, a suspicion that became so strong that just about eleven o'clock I entered the Jefatura Superior de Policia in the Calle de la Princesa, and again inquired for Señor Andrade.
And without another look, without a word of thanks, without time for anything or anybody, he turned on them the broad back of his great stature, straightened his triumphant shoulders, and strode out of the place. She was left confronted with her habitual critics. "'If it's wrong it's all right!" she extravagantly quoted to them. The counter-clerk was really awe-stricken.
Her function was to sit there with two young men the other telegraphist and the counter-clerk; to mind the "sounder," which was always going, to dole out stamps and postal-orders, weigh letters, answer stupid questions, give difficult change and, more than anything else, count words as numberless as the sands of the sea, the words of the telegrams thrust, from morning to night, through the gap left in the high lattice, across the encumbered shelf that her forearm ached with rubbing.
She cared neither to walk nor to sail; it was enough for her to sit on benches and wonder at the sea and taste the air and not be at Cocker's and not see the counter-clerk. She still seemed to wait for something something in the key of the immense discussions that had mapped out their little week of idleness on the scale of a world-atlas.
The counter-clerk would have played into her hands; but the counter-clerk was really reduced to idiocy by the effect of his passion for her. She flattered herself moreover, nobly, that with the unpleasant conspicuity of this passion she would never have consented to be obliged to him.
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