Adventure stories; Love stories; Treasure troves -- Fiction
But even though the captain was absent, there were other things at hand
that spoke of the girl with the hazel eyes. There was the place where
she had dropped the letters. There was the post against which she had
leaned as she watched him recover them. And there, as he bent over the
edge of the pier, he saw the little boat that had played its part in
the day's happenings.
How musical her voice was! And she had smiled at him once--no, twice!
Smiled not only with her lips but with her eyes.
He thought of her as he went slowly uptown. He thought of her until he
went to sleep and then his thinking changed to dreaming.
Decidedly, Tyke was not the only one who was hard hit on that eventful
day.
CHAPTER IV
THE SHADOWS OF ROMANCE
When Allen Drew opened his eyes the next morning, he was conscious of
an unusual feeling of elation. He lay for a moment in the twilight
zone between sleeping and waking, seeking the reason. Then in a flash
it came to him.
He was out of bed in a twinkling. Life was too full and rich now to
waste it in sleep. Yesterday morning it had seemed drab and
commonplace. To-day it sparkled with prismatic hues. He was a new man
in a new world.
He found himself whistling from sheer excess of good spirits as he
moved about the room. He hurried through his shower and dressing in
record time. Then he despatched his breakfast with a speed and
absent-mindedness that were most unusual for him and evoked the mild
astonishment of his landlady. A few minutes later he had joined the
hurrying throng that was moving toward the nearest subway station. He
left the train at Fulton Street and surprised Winters by appearing at
the shop a half hour earlier than his usual time.
There were two reasons for pressing haste on this morning. The moving
from the old quarters to the new involved an amount of work that was
appalling. There were a thousand things to be done, and for the next
week or ten days the force of three employees must work at top speed.
Current business would have to be attended to as usual, and in addition
there was the colossal task of removing the contents of the three
crowded floors from the old building to the new.
There was a second task which, in Drew's secret heart, seemed the more
important. That was to discover the address of the girl he had met on
the pier and learn what he could about her.
In the first flush of determination this had seemed to be a
comparatively easy matter. The very fact that he wanted it so badly
seemed to guarantee his success. Such difficulties as suggested
themselves he waved airily aside. No young Lochinvar coming out of the
West had felt more certain of carrying off his Ellen than Allen Drew
had felt the night before of finding Miss Ruth Adams. But when he
applied his mind to the task in the cold light of day, it did not seem
so easy and he was hazy as to the best way to go about it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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