FullReads

“O-h,” said the Traveling Salesman.

A little impatiently he turned and routed the Young Electrician out of his sprawling nap. “Don’t you know Boston when you see it?” he cried a trifle testily.

For an instant the Young Electrician’s sleepy eyes stared dully into the Girl’s excited face. Then he stumbled up a bit awkwardly and reached out for all his coil-boxes and insulators.

“Good-night to you. Much obliged to you,” he nodded amiably.

A moment later he and the Traveling Salesman were forging their way ahead through the crowded aisle. Like the transient, impersonal, altogether mysterious stimulant of a strain of martial music, the Young Electrician vanished into space. But just at the edge of the car steps the Traveling Salesman dallied a second to wait for the Youngish Girl.

“Say,” he said, “say, can I tell my wife what you’ve told me?”

“Y-e-s,” nodded the Youngish Girl soberly.

“And say,” said the Traveling Salesman, “say, I don’t exactly like to go off this way and never know at all how it all came out.” Casually his eyes fell on the big lynx muff in the Youngish Girl’s hand. “Say,” he said, “if I promise, honest-Injun, to go ‘way off to the other end of the station, couldn’t you just lift your muff up high, once, if everything comes out the way you want it?”

“Y-e-s,” whispered the Youngish Girl almost inaudibly.

Then the Traveling Salesman went hurrying on to join the Young Electrician, and the Youngish Girl lagged along on the rear edge of the crowd like a bashful child dragging on the skirts of its mother.

Out of the groups of impatient people that flanked the track she saw a dozen little pecking reunions, where some one dashed wildly into the long, narrow stream of travelers and yanked out his special friend or relative, like a good-natured bird of prey. She saw a tired, worn, patient-looking woman step forward with four noisy little boys, and then stand dully waiting while the Young Electrician gathered his riotous offspring to his breast. She saw the Traveling Salesman grin like a bashful school-boy, just as a red-cloaked girl came running to him and bore him off triumphantly toward the street.

And then suddenly, out of the blur, and the dust, and the dizziness, and the half-blinding glare of lights, the figure of a Man loomed up directly and indomitably across the Youngish Girl’s path–a Man standing bare-headed and faintly smiling as one who welcomes a much-reverenced guest–a Man tall, stalwart, sober-eyed, with a touch of gray at his temples, a Man whom any woman would be proud to have waiting for her at the end of any journey. And right there before all that hurrying, scurrying, self-centered, unseeing crowd, he reached out his hands to her and gathered her frightened fingers close into his.

“You’ve–kept–me–waiting–a–long–time,” he reproached her.

“Yes!” she stammered. “Yes! Yes! The train was two hours late!”

“It wasn’t the hours that I was thinking about,” said the Man very quietly. “It was the–year!”

And then, just as suddenly, the Youngish Girl felt a tug at her coat, and, turning round quickly, found herself staring with dazed eyes into the eager, childish face of the Traveling Salesman’s red-cloaked wife. Not thirty feet away from her the Traveling Salesman’s shameless, stolid-looking back seemed to be blocking up the main exit to the street.

“Oh, are you the lady from British Columbia?” queried the excited little voice. Perplexity, amusement, yet a divine sort of marital confidence were in the question.

“Yes, surely I am,” said the Youngish Girl softly.

Across the little wife’s face a great rushing, flushing wave of tenderness blocked out for a second all trace of the cruel, slim scar that marred the perfect contour of one cheek.

“Oh, I don’t know at all what it’s all about,” laughed the little wife, “but my husband asked me to come back and kiss you!”