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On a side track stood a freight-car, from which the customary men in silk caps were pulling the freight, and standing it about loosely on the platform. The car was detached from the parent train, which had left it not only orphaned on this siding, but apparently disabled; for Gaites heard the men talking about not having cut it out a minute too soon. One of them called, in at the broad low door, to some one inside, “All out?” and a voice from far within responded, “Case here, yet; I can’t handle it alone.”

The others went into the car, and then, with an interval for some heavy bumping and some strong language, they reappeared at the door with the case, which Gaites was by this time not surprised to find inscribed with the name and address of Miss Phyllis Desmond. He remained watching it, while the men got it on the platform, so wholly inattentive to Birkwall’s plot that the most besotted young author could not have failed to feel his want of interest. Birkwall then turned his vision outward upon the object which engrossed his friend, and started with an “Oh, hello!” and slapped him on the back.

Gaites nodded in proud assent, and Birkwall went on: “I thought you were faking the name last night; but I didn’t want to give you away. It was the real thing, wasn’t it, after all.”

“The real thing,” said Gaites, with his most toothful smile, and he laughed for pleasure in his friend’s astonishment.

“Well,” Birkwall resumed, “she seems to be following you up, old fellow. This will be great for Polly, and for Miss Seaward, who wanted you to follow her up; and for all Burymouth, for that matter. Why, Gaites, you’ll be the tea-table talk for a week; you’ll be married to that girl before you know it. What is the use of flying in the face of Providence? Come! There’s time enough to get a ticket, and have your check changed from Kent Harbor to Lower Merritt, and the Hill Country express will be along here at nine o’clock. You can’t let that poor thing start off on her travels alone again!”

Gaites flushed in a joyful confusion, and put the joke by as well as he could. But he was beginning to feel it not altogether a joke; it had acquired an element of mystery, of fatality, which flattered while it awed him; and he could not be easy till he had asked one of the freight-handlers what had happened to the car. He got an answer–flung over the man’s shoulder–which seemed willing enough, but was wholly unintelligible in the clang and clatter of a passenger-train which came pulling in from the southward.

“Here’s the Hill Country express now!” said Birkwall. “You won’t change your mind? Well, your Kent Harbor train backs down after this goes out. Don’t worry about the piano. I’ll find out what’s happened to the car it was in, and I’ll see that it’s put into a good strong one, next time.”

“Do! That’s a good fellow!” said Gaites, and in repeated promises, demanded and given, to come again, they passed the time till the Hill Country train pulled out and the Kent Harbor train backed down.

III.

Gaites was going to stay a week with a friend out on the Point; and after the first day he was so engrossed with the goings-on at Kent Harbor that he pretty well forgot about Burymouth, and the piano of Miss Phyllis Desmond lingered in his mind like the memory of a love one has outlived. He went to the golf links every morning in a red coat, and in plaid stockings which, if they did not show legs of all the desired fulness, attested a length of limb which was perhaps all the more remarkable for that reason. Then he came back to the beach and bathed; at half past one o’clock he dined at somebody’s cottage, and afterwards sat smoking seaward in its glazed or canopied veranda till it was time to go to afternoon tea at somebody else’s cottage, where he chatted about until he was carried off by his hostess to put on a black coat for seven or eight o’clock supper at the cottage of yet another lady.