“Oh, put it in Punch,” Andy appealed and let a servant hand him tea.
He was in England, as his world knew, to find Roberta Leigh. She, as all the world was widely aware, had passed a very, very stirring summer in Britain burning and laying waste to win votes for women. Yet for more than a month, Andy had followed her trail vainly. Therefore, he now was abandoning the search; first, because it had begun to dawn upon him that, unless Roberta wished him to find her, the results of success in his search would be decidedly doubtful; and second, for some weeks the efforts of the London police, aided by the outraged local authorities of nine shocked shires and counties, had made any purely private pursuit of Miss Leigh seem superfluous. So, as he proceeded north, he contented himself with buying the papers to learn what the police were accomplishing. Between times he read his review.
“Those observers who see in the feminist movement a weakening of the mating impulse in the woman,” he repeatedly rehearsed one paragraph, “are grievously mistaken. Indeed, the feminist movement—particularly in its most violent manifestations on the part of the so-called militant suffragettes—is only a newer phase of the pseudo defiance of man by woman which, from the earliest times, has been employed by woman to attract man.”
He looked up and, carefully putting his finger in the place at the paragraph, he stared out the car window as the train stopped. It was at only a little country station where a spur of track ran from the main line. Passengers were changing to a couple of stubby cars standing on that spur. Since he personally resolutely had abandoned the search for Roberta, he did not scrutinize the passengers closely. He merely made sure that there were only two girls in sight, and that the one, who might possibly be mistaken for Roberta, was not she; then he drew his head back within the window. His train started deliberately. He was glancing down to find his page in the pleasant quarterly review, when a pile of luggage on the platform appeared. On top of the pile stood a small, black, oblong, week-end box—half trunk, half hand bag—much pasted with customs labels and scratched with chalk, but quite definite and individual of size and shape. Andy saw it, and, with the startled cry of the incredulous, jumped to his feet, reckless of where the tea splashed.
“That’s hers. Join you later, if I’m wrong,” he condensed explanation, farewell, and promise to his hosts; and, as the train was still moving slowly, and the compartment was private and not locked, he opened the door and sprang down upon the end of the platform.
The train for Scotland kept on; the passengers for the stubby cars on the spur were settling themselves in their seats. Swiftly but thoroughly, Andy searched through each compartment. He was beginning to think he might have been impulsive in leaving his party when he returned to the pile of luggage. But there was no possible doubt of the week-end box. Its owner might not be present; but it was, or at least it had been, possessed by her for whom he—and the police also—searched.
“Who’s with that?” he demanded of the luggage porter bearing it toward the train.
“Wot?” the man put it down with resigned reproach. “And now you clime it, sir?”
Andy assured that, so far from asserting possession, his whole desire was to discover the owner.
She, it appeared, had proceeded some twenty-four hours previously through this junction to the ancient and historic town of Stoketon to which definite designation, the porter fervently prayed, the stubby train safely and swiftly would convey the box and thereby spare a hitherto careful and completely competent porter from further blame for misunderstanding the direction of the index finger of a gentleman much under the influence of liquor the day before, who appeared to claim the black box for his own, and was satisfied to take it with him twenty miles in the wrong direction. Simultaneously with the gentleman’s sobering up and returning the box, female inquiry had come from Stoketon. No, nothing more alarming than the loss of luggage had been heard from Stoketon.