"No; it's me—Rhoda!" came back the voice of her niece.
"Where on earth have you been?" cried her aunt. "You scared us almost to death!"
"Oh, flying around!" answered Rhoda. "I want my tooth-powder and nail-brush."
"What are you going to do now?" shouted Mrs. Tassifer, through the door.
"I'm going to get married," replied Rhoda. "Please hand me my things."
There were but two passengers to come down the gangplank when the Washington boat docked the next morning at Old Point Comfort. Trade had been, in fact, very light for several weeks, and the hotels had been practically closed owing to the defection of the colored help, who in a frenzy of religious fervor, had abandoned their jobs to prepare, by prayer and chanting, for the day of Judgment.
Carrying their grips, Bennie and Rhoda walked along the wooden pier and entered a hotel. A decrepit clerk assigned them rooms and handed Bennie a pen freshly dipped in ink. With his hand poised above the blank page of the register, our hero hesitated. They had come there to avoid the pestering crowds, the adulation, the publicity, the reporters. Should he sign as was befitting—"Professor and Mrs. Benjamin Hooker, Washington, D.C."? In that case, even that old dormouse of a hotel-clerk would recognize his identity and the hotel would swarm with interviewers. Yet—did he dare? He had only been married a few hours. He glanced apprehensively at Rhoda, who was examining some needlework in a showcase. Then he resolutely gripped the pen and scrawled, B. Hooker and wife, Camb. Mass.
All that day, the two star-voyagers wandered over the white beach, drinking in the odoriferous breath of the coming spring and talking over their experiences of the past seventy-two hours.
And, in the evening, they sat on the sand and watched the sea darken and caught the first glint of the moon's edge as it pushed up over the horizon. They neither saw the throng of reporters who poured off the afternoon train nor suspected that they were the marked-down quarry of a pack of ravenous wolves.