With the Procession

by Henry Blake Fuller

Two or three late lunchers had come in and were clattering their knives and forks at the table opposite the girl whom Jane had called Sophie. Sophie still sat in her place; she held her paper with a firm hand, and turned the leaves at intervals. She looked up once—as the party was passing out. Truesdale stepped over the door-mat rapidly, on the far side of Jane and Bertie and Mrs. Rhodes. He dropped his glove that he might stoop for it, and as he stooped he shot a rapid glance through the narrow door of the other room. The girl still held her paper before her face, but she sent a single look after the party athwart its side.

Truesdale stepped into the hall and pressed the button of the elevator. "It's Sophie, true enough—not a bit of doubt about it. If she didn't recognize me just now, she'll never have I another chance to—here."

He handed his charges into the elevator. "Well, what do you think of Jane and her doings now?" he asked, briskly, as he stepped in after them. "Can you think of any better opening for the investment of your idle funds? Isn't she an able financier? Hasn't she got a great administrative capacity? Isn't she one of the rising young men of the day?" As he flung off this string of stock phrases from the newspapers, his eyes flashed brightly, a mounting color came into his cheeks, and a triumphant smile to his lips, and a caressing and ringing vibration into his voice. He seemed to coruscate with all the conquering insolence of youth; Bertie Patterson had never seen him quite so handsome.

"Down we go!" he cried to his aunt, as the cab resumed its course with a sudden, breath-taking drop. "No; don't catch hold of me—I'm only a broken reed. Yes; try the door-jamb—much more satisfactory. But look out for your fingers—never get your fingers caught." Then, as they arrived at the street level: "Wait a second; don't hurry. Be sure of your footing; don't stumble and break your neck at the last minute—one poor last little chance, after so many glorious opportunities have gone by!"

"'Sh, Truesdale!" whispered his aunt.

For there were other people in the elevator, and they looked askance at this smart volley of verbal superfluities.

He led them out to the carriage. "Here we are on solid ground once more," he continued; "best place in the world to be. No; don't ask me to get in—I'll walk on a bit. I wouldn't leave terra firma now for anything." He handed his aunt in, and then Bertie. He exacted from Bertie a perfectly superfluous shake of the hand, bowed over that hand with a sudden access of gravity, and lost himself in an abysmal reverie before he had traversed a hundred yards.

He saw before him a high-heaped assemblage of red-tiled roofs, and above them rose the fretwork of a soaring Gothic spire. A narrow river half encircled the town, and a battered old bridge, guarded by a round-towered gateway, led out into the open country towards a horizon bounded by a low range of blue hills. Trumpet-calls rang out from distant barrack-yards, and troops of dragoons clattered noisily over the rough pavement of the great square. The dragoons passed, and a colony of awnings and umbrellas sprang up in their place, and bands of stocky peasantry chattered and chaffered, and left the pavement strewn with the loose leaves of cabbages and carrot-tops. Then night came and blotted these out, and the moon rose and music played, and throngs of officers and students and towns-people sat through a long-drawn evening before the coffee-houses round-about. High towards the stars towered the columns and pediments of a vast official structure, whose broken sky-line sawed the heavens, and whose varied cornices and ledges were disjointed by deep and perplexing shadows. On each side of the great portal which opened through the pillared arcade there was stationed a mounted cuirassier, and above it there appeared in large letters—

"Marshall & Belden," said Truesdale, suddenly emerging from his reverie. He sprang lightly over the muddy gutter and found a foothold on the damp flagging. "Pshaw!" he said, rather ruefully; "in a moment more she would have come to meet me."

He looked up at the building before him. "Well, really, they've made quite a decent affair of it. But what are they doing to the sign? Oh, I see: putting 'The' to the front of it, and 'Co.' to the back. That ladder looks rather shaky. The Marshall & Belden Co.' Perhaps it would be civil of me to call on the new concern—seeing that I have chanced their way."