Everybody agreed that it was a happy thought and even Jimmie Wellington, like a great baby, bounding from tears to laughter on the instant, was chortling: "A rishe trap? That's abslootly splendid--greates' invensh' modern times. I must stick around and see her when she flops." And then he lurched forward like a too-obliging elephant. "Let me help you." Mrs. Whitcomb, who had now mounted a step ladder and poised herself as gracefully as possible, shrieked with alarm, as she saw Wellington's bulk rolling toward her frail support. If Hudson and Shaw had not been football veterans at West Point and had not known just what to do when the center rush comes bucking the line, they could never have blocked that flying wedge. But they checked him and impelled him backward through his own curtains into his own berth. Finding himself on his back, he decided to remain there. And there he remained, oblivious of the carnival preparations going on just outside his canopy. CHAPTER VII THE MASKED MINISTER Being an angel must have this great advantage at least, that one may sit in the grandstand overlooking the earth and enjoy the ludicrous blunders of that great blind man's buff we call life. This night, if any angels were watching Chicago, the Mallory mix-up must have given them a good laugh, or a good cry--according to their natures. Here were Mallory and Marjorie, still merely engaged, bitterly regretting their inability to get married and to continue their journey together. There in the car were the giggling conspirators preparing a bridal mockery for their sweet confusion. Then the angels might have nudged one another and said: "Oh, it's all right now. There goes a minister hurrying to their very car. Mallory has the license in his pocket, and here comes the parson. Hooray!" And then the angelic cheer must have died out as the one great hurrah of a crowded ball-ground is quenched in air when the home team's vitally needed home run swerves outside the line and drops useless as a stupid foul ball. In a shabby old hack, were two of the happiest runaways that ever sought a train. They were not miserable like the young couple in the taxicab. They were white-haired both. They had been married for thirty years. Yet this was their real honeymoon, their real elopement. The little woman in the timid gray bonnet clapped her hands and tittered like a schoolgirl. "Oh, Walter, I can't believe we're really going to leave Ypsilanti for a while. Oh, but you've earned it after thirty years of being a preacher." "Hush. Don't let me hear you say the awful word," said the little old man in the little black hat and the close-fitting black bib. "I'm so tired of it, Sally, I don't want anybody on the train to know it." "They can't help guessing it, with your collar buttoned behind."