“Our engagement must be a profound secret until the year of my mourning is over.”
Trent’s drab and scanty whiskers seemed to curl into hard knots over the nervous facial contortion in which he indulged. Nature being out of material when at work upon him had seemingly constructed his muscles from stout twine. An inch of it joining his nose to the upper lip, the former’s pointed tip was wont to punctuate his conversation and emotions with the direct downward movement of a machine needle puncturing cloth. He crumpled the letter in his bony nervous fingers, and his pale sharp grey eyes opened and shut with sudden rapidity.
“I knew I could not be mistaken,” he thought triumphantly. “She is mine!”
In the vestibule another name was checked off,—“Mr. Norton Boswell,”—and its owner made eagerly for the desk. His dark intellectual face was flushed, and his sensitive mouth twitched suddenly as the clerk handed him a roll of Mss.
“Never mind that,” he said hastily. “Give me my letters.”
The clerk handed him several, and, whisking them from left to right through his impatient hands, he thrust all but one into his pocket and walked rapidly to the morning-room. Seating himself before a table, he looked at the envelope as if not daring to solve its mystery, then hastily tore it apart.
“Mon ami! [Boswell, despite his ardour, threw a glance down a certain corridor in his memory and thought with kindling eyes: “Oh! with what divine sweetness did she use to utter those two little words!” Then he fixed his eyes greedily on the page once more.] I have but this moment received your letter, which seems to have been delayed.” [“Ah!” rapturously, the paper dancing before his eyes, “that accounts for it. I knew she was the most tender-hearted creature on earth.”] “I say nothing here of the happiness which its contents have given me. Come at once.
“Jessica Pendleton.
“Our engagement must be a profound secret until the year of my mourning is over.”
Boswell, with quivering nostrils, plunged a pen into the ink-well, and in that quiet room two hearts thumped so loudly that only passion and scratching pens averted mutual and withering contempt.