All this time Celia and Gordon were touring Milton, serenely unconscious of danger near, or guardian angel of the name of Joe.
Investigation disclosed the fact that there was a train for Pittsburgh about three in the afternoon. Gordon sent a code telegram to his chief, assuring him of the safety of the message, and of his own intention to proceed to Washington as fast as steam could carry him. Then he took the girl to a restaurant, where they mounted two high stools, and partook with an unusually ravenous appetite of nearly everything on the menu—corn soup, roast beef, baked trout, stewed tomatoes, cold slaw, custard, apple, and mince pies, with a cup of good country coffee and real cream—all for twenty-five cents apiece.
It was a very merry meal. Celia felt somehow as if for the time all memory of the past had been taken from her, and she were free to think and act happily in the present, without any great problems to solve or decisions to make. Just two young people off having a good time, they were, at least until that afternoon train came.
After their dinner, they took a short walk to a tiny park where two white ducks disported themselves on a seven-by-nine pond, spanned by a rustic bridge where lovers had cut their initials. Gordon took out his knife and idly cut C. H. in the rough bark of the upper rail, while his companion sat on the little board seat and watched him. She was pondering over the fact that he had cut her initials, and not his own. It would have been like the George of old to cut his own and never once think of hers. And he had put but one H. Probably he thought of her now as Celia Hayne, without the Hathaway, or else he was so used to writing her name Celia Hathaway, that he was not thinking at all.
Those letters! How they haunted her and clouded every bright experience that she fain would have grasped and held for a little hour.
They were silent now, while he worked and she thought. He had finished the C. H., and was cutting another C, but instead of making another H, he carefully carved out the letter G. What was that for? C. G.? Who was C. G.? Oh, how stupid! George, of course. He had started a C by mistake. But he did not add the expected H. Instead he snapped his knife shut, laid his hand over the carving, and leaned over the rail.
“Some time, perhaps, we’ll come here again, and remember,” he said, and then bethought him that he had no right to hope for any such anniversary.
“Oh!” She looked up into his eyes, startled, troubled, the haunting of her fears in the shadows of the blue.
He looked down into them and read her trouble, read and understood, and looked back his great desire to comfort her.
His look carried further than he meant it should. For the third time that day a thrill of wonder and delight passed over her and left her fearful with a strange joy that she felt she should put from her.