The man glanced up impatiently from a calculation he was making and said, shortly—“11.10.”
Cunningham strolled back to the girl. “It is obviously impossible to wait here an hour and forty minutes,” he said. “Suppose we go back to the theatre and see the last act. We’ve only missed one act at most, and the last is the prettiest of all.”
Miss Ronald was too miserable to object or make any suggestions, so they got into a cab and Cunningham gave minute instructions to the driver not to fall off the box and kill himself, or let the horse walk out of the harness, and to be particularly careful about the wheels coming off, and not to try to demolish any ice-wagons that might be harmlessly roving the streets. The driver took these remarks good-humoredly, but was naturally much mystified, and after thinking it over concluded that Cunningham was either very drunk or very crazy.
They got back to the theatre in a short time and saw the success of “The Rivals,” and the duel and the just exposure of the infamous Matthews, and wished heartily that their affairs were as happily wound up as those of the fair Miss Linley and Sheridan.
It was just ten minutes of eleven when they started back for the Boston and Albany station. Cunningham had retained the cab they had come in and had given still further and more minute directions to the driver, so that as they settled themselves back on the stuffy cushions, they thought they could reasonably hope to get the train in time and safety. When they entered the waiting-room Miss Ronald saw with a sigh of relief that it was just eleven o’clock. There was plenty of time, and it was with a somewhat triumphant air of having conquered immense difficulties, of having fought bravely a hard fight, that Cunningham walked up once more to the ticket-office.
“Two tickets, please,” he said briskly as he handed out a dollar bill. The man looked at him for a moment as if making an effort to remember where he had seen him before.
“This is the through express to New York. You’ll need more stuff than that to get two tickets,” he said, jocosely.
“You told me”—gasped Cunningham.
“Yes,” asserted the man. “You asked me when the next train went out and I told you. Of course I thought you knew where you were going,” he added, derisively.
Cunningham began to feel very desperate indeed.