“You! Your term!”
“Never mind that. I shall write to the Warden pleading urgent private business. I have enough in hand for our passage, and the ‘Censor’ will take my articles and give me an introduction. I shall be able to keep myself and her. I have a real longing to see Fiddler’s Ranch.”
“But can you rough it?” asked Dolores, anxiously looking at his delicate girlish complexion and slight figure.
“Oh yes! I was born to it. I know what it was when Fiddler’s Ranch was far from the civilization of Violinia, as they call it now. I don’t mean to make a secret of it, and grieve your heart or Cherie’s. She has had enough of that, but I must make the plunge to save my sister, and if things come round it will be all the better to have some practical knowledge of the masses and the social problems by living among them.”
“Oh that I could make the experiment with you!”
“You will be my inspiration and encouragement, and come to me in due time.”
He came round to her, and she let him give her his first kiss.
“God will help us,” she said reverently; “it is the cause of uprightness and deliverance from cruel bondage.”
The plans had been settled; Gerald had arranged with a cab which was to take him and his sister to a house five miles out in the country, of which Miss Hackett had given the name, so that they might seem to have been spending the evening with her. Thence it was but a step to the station of a different railway from that which went through Silverton, and they would go by the mail train to London, where Ludmilla could be deposited at Mrs. Grinstead’s house at Brompton, where Martha could provide her with an outfit, while Gerald saw the editor of the ‘Censor’, got some money from the bank, telegraphed to Oxford for his baggage, and made ready to start the next morning for Liverpool, whither he had telegraphed to secure a second-class passage to New York for G. F. Wood and Lydia Wood, the names which he meant to be called by.
“The first name I knew,” he said, “the name of Tom Wood, is far more real to me or my father than Edgar Underwood ever could be.”