" She handed the porter a coin.
"I went to the berth you mentioned, ma'am, and I asked through the
curtains: 'Is Mr. Dauntless in here?' There was a lady in the upper,
miss, an'--an'--well, I'll never forget what she said to me." Eleanor
had gone before he concluded, determined to unearth her cautious
lover, if possible.
Anne caught the porter before he could follow.
"See here, porter," she whispered softly, "go to Car 5, section 6, and
call its occupant. Tell him NOT to get up. Do you understand? NOT to
get up!"
It goes without saying, of course, that all efforts, secret or
otherwise, failed to locate the missing men. The distracted brides,
each trying to run away from the other in a way, were in a state of
collapse, necessarily subdued but most alarming. The Rev. Henry Derby,
a nice-looking young fellow, who looked more like a tennis player than
a minister of the gospel, eventually identified his old friend's ladye
faire, and introduced himself with a discreetness that proved him to
have been in college at the proper period and in a somewhat different
class from that which he now sought to lead. In the privacy of her
drawing-room the bewitching but distressed young woman discussed the
situation with the man who had been chosen to perform the clandestine
ceremony in the far-away town of Omegon.
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