Homeward again in the starlit night, still in that whirl of exultation. It was somewhat chillier now, and Allison bundled her into the machine with rough tenderness. She felt the thrill of him as he sat beside her, and the firm strength with which he controlled the swiftly speeding runabout, was part her strength. They were kindred spirits, these two, soaring above the affairs of earth in the serene complacency of those who make trifles of vastness itself. They did not talk much, for they had not much to talk about. The details of a scheme so comprehensive as Allison’s were not things to be explained, they were things to be seen in a vision. Once she asked him about the bringing of the foreign railroads into the combination, and he told her that this would only be accomplished by a political upheaval, which would take place next month, and would probably involve the whole of Europe. It was another detail; and it seemed quite natural. She was so interested that he told her all about his foreign visitors.
In the Park, Allison stopped at the little outlook house where they had climbed on that snowy night, and they stood there, with the stars above and the trees below and the twinkling lights stretching out to the horizon, all alone above the world of civilisation. Below sounded the clang of street cars, and far off to the left, high in the air, there gleamed the lights of a curving L train. That was a part of Allison’s world which he had long since conquered, a part which he already held in the hollow of his hand; and the fact that every moving thing which clung upon a track in all this vast panorama was under his dominion, served only to illustrate and make plain the marvel of the accomplishment which was now under way. Beyond that dim horizon lay another and still another, and in them all, wherever things moved or were transported, the lift of Allison’s finger was to start and stop the wheels, to the uttermost confines of the earth! Oh, it was wonderful; wonderful! And she was part of it!
It was there that he proposed to her. It did not surprise her. She had known it when they had entered the Park, and that this was the place.
He told her that all this empire was being builded to lay at her feet, that she was the empress of it and he the emperor, but that their joy was to be not in the sway, not in the sceptre and crown, but in the doing, and in the having done, and in the conceiving and having conceived!
Was this a cold painting of pomp and glory and advantage and reward? He added to it the fire of a lover, and to that the force and mastery and compulsion of his dynamic power. She felt again the potent thrill of him, and the might and sweep and drive of him, and with the hot, tumbling words of love in her ears, and her senses a-reel, and her mind in its whirling exultation, she felt between them a sympathy and a union which it was not in human strength to deny! Something held her back, something made her withhold the word of promise, on the plea that she must have more time to think, to consider, to straighten out the tangle of her mind; but she suffered him to sweep her in his arms, and rain hot kisses upon her face, and to tell her, over and over and over and over, that she belonged to him, forever and forever!
CHAPTER XXVII
ALLISON’S PRIVATE AND PARTICULAR DEVIL
The free and entirely uncurbed enjoyed an unusual treat. It had a sensation which did not need to be supported by a hectic imagination or a lurid vocabulary. Vedder Court had been condemned for the use of the Municipal Transportation Company! A new eight track, double-deck tube was to be constructed through Crescent Island to the mainland!
Grand climax! Through this tube and into Vedder Court, at the platforms of the surface and L and subway cars, was to come the passenger trains of the new Atlantic-Pacific Railroad, a line three hundred miles shorter than any now stretching between Broadway and the Golden Gate! Any reader of the daily press, of whom there are several, knows precisely what the free and entirely uncurbed did with this bit of simon-pure information. The glittering details began on the first page, turned on the second, continued on the fourth, jumped over to the seventh, and finished back among the real estate ads. It began early in the morning, and it continued until late at night, fresh details piling upon each other in mad profusion, their importance limited only by the restrictions of type!
Extra! The trick by which the A.-P. ran through the mountains over the Inland Pacific’s track!
Extra, extra! The compulsion by which the Midcontinent was brought to complete the big gap in the new A.-P. system!