"I am at a hotel," he said, and no more.
"I see," she said, frowning very darkly for her.
He studied her face for a moment, and then arose from the chair beside her
bed. "You may be interested to hear that while I am invited to attend the
wedding to-morrow afternoon I shall not be there," he said, divining her
thoughts.
"I didn't like to ask," she said. The nurse came into the room. "He says
I'm doing as well as could be expected, Miss McKane," she said glibly,
"and if nothing unforeseen happens I'll be dodging automobiles in Fifth
Avenue inside of two weeks. Good-bye, Doctor."
"Good-bye. I'll look in to-morrow—afternoon," he said.
* * * * *
The marriage of Anne Tresslyn and Templeton Thorpe took place at the home
of the bridegroom at four o'clock on the afternoon of the twenty-third. A
departure from the original plans was made imperative at the eleventh hour
by the fact that Mr. Thorpe had been quite ill during the night. His
condition was in no sense alarming, but the doctors announced that a
postponement of the wedding was unavoidable unless the ceremony could be
held in the Thorpe home instead of at Mrs. Tresslyn's as originally
planned. Moreover, the already heavily curtailed list of guests would have
to be narrowed to even smaller proportions. The presence of so many as the
score of selected guests might prove to be hazardous in view of the old
gentleman's state of nerves, not to say health. Mr. Thorpe was able to be
up and about with the aid of the imperturbable Wade, but he was
exceedingly irascible and hard to manage. He was annoyed with Braden. When
the strange illness came early in the night, he sent out for his grandson.
He wanted him to be there if anything serious was to result from the
stroke,—he persisted in calling it a stroke, scornfully describing his
attack as a "rush of blood to the head from a heart that had been squeezed
too severely by old Father Time." Braden was not to be found. What annoyed
Mr. Thorpe most was the young man's unaccountable disposition to desert
him in his hour of need. In his querulous tirade, he described his
grandson over and over again as an ingrate, a traitor, a good-for-nothing
without the slightest notion of what an obligation means.
He did not know, and was not to know for many days, that his grandson had
purposely left town with the determination not to return until the ill-
mated couple were well on their way to the Southland, where the ludicrous
honeymoon was to be spent. And so it was that the old family doctor had to
be called in to take charge of Mr. Thorpe in place of the youngster on
whom he had spent so much money and of whom he expected such great and
glorious things.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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