United States or Côte d'Ivoire ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
For, as the doors swung together behind him, he saw Miss Pratt. There were no gates nor iron barriers to obscure the view; there was no train-shed to darken the air. She was at some distance, perhaps two hundred feet, along the tracks, where the sleeping-cars of the long train would stop. But there she stood, mistakable for no other on this wide earth!
"Allan will be so astonished and delighted," she said, when the coupé rolled out of the train-shed. She remembered now with a sort of pride the fine, unflinching sternness with which he had condemned divorce. In a man of principles so staunch one might overlook many surface eccentricities.
Till she went, four days later, she was curiously still, he cumbrously affectionate. Her train left at noon. As he saw it grow small beyond the train-shed he longed to hurry to Tanis. "No, by golly, I won't do that!" he vowed. "I won't go near her for a week!" But he was at her flat at four.
And then, while he was still striving to discern signs of depravity under the gentle and kindly exterior of the elderly confidence-man, a young woman, leading a little boy of some three or four years of age and bearing many bundles, hurried up to "Four-Fingered Phillips," spoke, helped him to his feet and guided him away toward the train-shed. Tom sighed. It was too much for him!
The doors were thrown open. He walked out to the train-shed; a porter came after him with his trunk. His trunk? All right; he had almost forgotten it. Put it in there, in this empty compartment! He entered after it had been stowed away; then he collapsed utterly. He sat in the corner; his gaunt, emaciated body shivered convulsively.
All these sounds and others even more discordant, greeted the tired passengers of the Buffalo express, as, arriving from the West, they emerged from the train-shed into the deafening turmoil of Forty-second Street. John Madison, tanned and weather-beaten, suitcase in hand, stood hesitating on the curb, as if dazed.
In ample time Billy found herself in the great waiting-room, with John saying respectfully in her ear: "The man says the train comes in on Track Fourteen, Miss, an' it's on time." At twenty-nine minutes past four Billy left her seat and walked down the train-shed platform to Track Number Fourteen.
Well, I'm not going to be any more cordial than the law calls for. I'll have to bring 'em out in a carriage, I suppose. She'll be too limp for the trolley." He reached the station barely in time to engage a carriage before the train came in. He took up his position inside the gates through which all passengers must pass from the train-shed into the great station.
"She'll never do much anywhere, but she'll always find some man crazy to do for her," and he added something in German about the eternal feminine, which Ernestine failed to get. There was a steady drizzle from a lowering, greasy sky outside of the train-shed, and the two paused at the door. With a long sigh Ernestine emitted, "I only hope she'll be happy now!"
"No," he said; "it's my privilege to speed the parting guest, if I can do no more than that," and so we breasted the spitting snow-storm which was sweeping the empty streets, tramping in silence until we reached the shelter of the train-shed. It was after the train had whistled for the crossing below the town that Whitley asked me again what I intended doing.
Word Of The Day