Government investigators -- Fiction; Impostors and imposture -- Fiction; Religious fiction; Romantic suspense fiction
Investigation disclosed the fact that there was a train for Pittsburgh
about three in the afternoon. Gordon sent a code telegram to his chief,
assuring him of the safety of the message, and of his own intention
to proceed to Washington as fast as steam could carry him. Then he
took the girl to a restaurant, where they mounted two high stools, and
partook with an unusually ravenous appetite of nearly everything on the
menu--corn soup, roast beef, baked trout, stewed tomatoes, cold slaw,
custard, apple, and mince pies, with a cup of good country coffee and
real cream--all for twenty-five cents apiece.
It was a very merry meal. Celia felt somehow as if for the time all
memory of the past had been taken from her, and she were free to think
and act happily in the present, without any great problems to solve or
decisions to make. Just two young people off having a good time, they
were, at least until that afternoon train came.
After their dinner, they took a short walk to a tiny park where two
white ducks disported themselves on a seven-by-nine pond, spanned by a
rustic bridge where lovers had cut their initials. Gordon took out his
knife and idly cut C. H. in the rough bark of the upper rail, while
his companion sat on the little board seat and watched him. She was
pondering over the fact that he had cut her initials, and not his own.
It would have been like the George of old to cut his own and never once
think of hers. And he had put but one H. Probably he thought of her now
as Celia Hayne, without the Hathaway, or else he was so used to writing
her name Celia Hathaway, that he was not thinking at all.
Those letters! How they haunted her and clouded every bright experience
that she fain would have grasped and held for a little hour.
They were silent now, while he worked and she thought. He had finished
the C. H., and was cutting another C, but instead of making another
H, he carefully carved out the letter G. What was that for? C. G.?
Who was C. G.? Oh, how stupid! George, of course. He had started a C
by mistake. But he did not add the expected H. Instead he snapped his
knife shut, laid his hand over the carving, and leaned over the rail.
“Some time, perhaps, we’ll come here again, and remember,” he said,
and then bethought him that he had no right to hope for any such
anniversary.
“Oh!” She looked up into his eyes, startled, troubled, the haunting of
her fears in the shadows of the blue.
He looked down into them and read her trouble, read and understood, and
looked back his great desire to comfort her.
His look carried further than he meant it should. For the third time
that day a thrill of wonder and delight passed over her and left her
fearful with a strange joy that she felt she should put from her.
It was only an instant, that look, but it brought the bright color to
both faces, and made Gordon feel the immediate necessity of changing
the subject.
“See those little fishes down there,” he said pointing to the tiny lake
below them.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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