Nor did the veil walk away alone. My trunk became imbued with the spirit of adventure, and branched off on its own account up somewhere into Vermont. I suppose it would have kept on and reached perhaps the North Pole by this time, had not Crene's dark eyes,--so pretty to look at that one instinctively feels they ought not to be good for anything, if a just impartiality is to be maintained, but they are,--had not Crene's dark eyes seen it tilting into a baggage-crate, and trundling off towards the Green Mountains, but too late. Of course there was a formidable hitch in the programme. A court of justice was improvised on the car-steps. I was the plaintiff, Crene chief evidence, baggage-master both defendant and examining-counsel. The case did not admit of a doubt. There was the little insurmountable check, whose brazen lips could speak no lie. "Keep hold of that," whispered Crene, and a yoke of oxen could not have drawn it from me. "You are sure you had it marked for Fontdale," says Mr. Baggage-master. I hold the impracticable check before his eyes in silence. "Yes, well, it must have gone on to Albany." "But it went away on that track," says Crene. "Couldn't have gone on that track. Of course they wouldn't have carried it away over there just to make it go wrong." For me, I am easily persuaded and dissuaded. If he had told me that it must have gone in such a direction, that it was a moral and mental impossibility should have gone in any other, and have it times enough, with a certain confidence and contempt of any other contingency, I should gradually have lost faith in my own eyes, and said, "Well, I suppose it did." But Crene is not to be asserted into yielding one inch, and insists that the trunk went to Vermont and not to New York, and is thoroughly unmanageable. The baggage-master, in anguish of soul, trots out his subordinates, one after another,-- "Is this the man that wheeled the trunk away? Is this? Is this?" The brawny-armed fellows hang back, and scowl, and muffle words in a very suspicious manner, and protest they won't be got into a scrape. But Crene has no scrape for them. She cannot swear to their identity. She had eyes only for the trunk. "Well," says Baggage-man, at his wits' end, "you let me take your check, and I'll send the trunk on by express, when it comes." I pity him, and relax my clutch. "No," whispers Crene; "as long as you have your check, you as good as have your trunk; but when you give that up, you have nothing. Keep that till you see your trunk." My clutch re-tightens. "At any rate, you can wait till the next train, and see if it doesn't come back. You'll get to your journey's end just as soon." "Shall I? Well, I will," compliant as usual. "No," interposes my good genius again. "Men are always saying that a woman never goes when she engages to go. She is always a train later or a train earlier, and you can't meet her." Pliant to the last touch, I say aloud,--