A SUPERIOR BEING.
He wasn’t a bad man as the world goes, but he was not a strong man morally. He and the girl made a mistake, he, because he was morally weak—she because she believed that he could do nothing wrong. From that hour he began his downward career. He borrowed, embezzled and even stole money, and one afternoon by a preconcerted plan the pair took the train for Toronto. Deluded wretch, swift as went the train bearing him away, he thought forever, from the scene of his misdeeds, a tiny wire string along the track bore a message swift as thought past him. So swift indeed, that a detective had time to go home, eat a quiet supper, and walk leisurely down to the Union station and smoke a good cigar on the platform while waiting for the victims that were sure to come. And all this time the pair were sitting in the railway carriage planning schemes for the future, and never dreaming of what was before them. The man was sent back to his own county for trial, and the girl’s father came down a few days afterwards and took her home.
The express going west had made up by this time, and the crowd on the platform was thickening. Cabs and omnibusses rattled down York and Simcoe streets and drew up on the Esplanade front. A large group of well dressed people, flowery with buttonhole and hand bouquets, smiles, and laughter came sweeping in. In the center of the group is a handsome girl, with flushed face and unnaturally bright eyes, whose every motion is nervous and constrained. She is neatly dressed in a brown traveling suit and holds a superb bouquet in her trembling hand. By her side, with a self-satisfied look of proprietorship and triumph, stands a gentleman who glances with no little impatience in his eyes, first at the train and then at the group around him. But with the first clang of the gong