"No," said Leslie, "she does not appear to be." ("Appear to be!"—just as if that scamp did not know where she was, and as if he had not a letter in his pocket from her!) "No, see—Miss Crawford and her two brothers, with another lady whose name I have never heard before."
The result of this discovery was that the parties met at breakfast, a slight flush (corresponding to that of Harding a little while before) mounting to the face of Bell Crawford as she introduced the two friends to her brothers and Miss Hobart. Very naturally, thereafter, though there was an overplus of males and a deficiency of females to make the association perfect, the two parties blended, and in the future plans for sight-seeing and amusement each made arrangements for and calculated upon the other.
They were just passing from the breakfast-room—that cool breakfast and dining-room of the Cataract, overlooking the lower rapids with the clumped little islands near the bridge,—when Leslie caught sight of a figure crossing the hall.
"Look—quick!" he said, touching the arm of Harding. "Look down the hall. There he is, now! Do you not recognize him?"
Harding, to whom Leslie had of course told the story of his late rencontre, looked in the direction indicated. Just for one instant the face of the person alluded to was turned towards them, and Harding plainly distinguished that it was that of the Virginian whom they had seen at the corner of Houston Street on the night of the opening of this story. He had but a moment to observe, for the tall man was almost at the office-door, and in an instant he had disappeared through it. At the same instant Marion Hobart uttered a quick, sharp cry, and staggered against John Crawford, as if about to fall. All the party gathered around her instantly, two or three of the waiters came up, and for the moment attention was distracted from everything beside.
"I had a sudden pain here. I do not feel very well. If you please I will go up to my room and lie down a little while. But I shall soon be better," said the young Virginian girl, in response to the anxious inquiries of her friends as to the cause of the sudden cry and the evident paleness of her face.
In compliance with her wish Bell Crawford accompanied her up-stairs; and the moment after, Tom Leslie stepped into the office-door through which he had seen Dexter Ralston disappear. He was not there. In reply to an inquiry, the clerk said that a tall man, whom he had seen several times before, had come into the room and stepped to the counter a moment, perhaps to examine the register, but that he had almost instantly gone out again. Leslie looked through the halls and upon the piazza, a little perplexed by the sudden appearances and disappearances of this man; but he was not in sight anywhere—he had evidently left the house.
Before quitting the breakfast-table, it had been arranged that the whole reinforced party should use the fine morning for a ride over the bridge into Canada, a three-seated carriage being called into requisition. But after the gentlemen had waited a few moments for tidings from the sudden invalid, Bell Crawford came down-stairs again and announced that they would be obliged to take the ride without female company, as Miss Hobart felt too much indisposed to ride and would remain in her room, and she could not think of leaving her entirely alone in a strange house on the first day of their arrival. Marion, she said, had proclaimed her willingness to remain alone, and had even urged her to go, but she had refused and would remain.
This arrangement did not precisely please any of the gentlemen, and least of all it pleased Walter Lane Harding, who had lately ridden over all that ground quite often enough unless he was to go over it this time in peculiarly pleasant company. He had an insane belief, by this time, that Miss Bell Crawford was "very pleasant company." But there was little else to do, than to obey the decrees of fate; one of the ladies was temporarily an invalid, and the other, for humanity's sake, must play nurse; the gentlemen could have little of their society, at least for the morning; and so half an hour afterwards, while Bell Crawford returned up-stairs, fortified with a novel and two Buffalo papers, to perform her self-denying office of Good Samaritan, the four gentlemen took an open landau and were whirled down to the Suspension Bridge and over to the Canada side.
Their drive had lasted perhaps three hours and covered nearly twenty miles, when, hastening back to dinner, they drove in at the gate-house on the Canada side of the Suspension Bridge. A close-carriage was just leaving the bridge at the same moment. Between this and the carriage in which the four friends were seated, a clumsy furniture-wagon attempted to pass at the moment when they stopped to show tickets, and in doing so the driver locked his wheel with that of the close-carriage coming over. The friends noticed that there were trunks on the rack of this carriage, and that though the day was so hot and sultry, the windows were closed. As the wheels locked, one of the windows was dashed down with some petulance, and a head appeared through it, while a sharp, strong voice cried: