"By George!" he said. "Stop!—hold on!—don't make those crows-feet any plainer, or I shall begin to get weak in the back and shaky in the knees, and you will need to supply me with a cane."
"They will come off easier than the next ones painted there, probably!" commented the philosophical costumer, as he finished painting up his human sign. "And now for the finishing stroke!" He stepped to a drawer, took out a gray full-bottom beard, fitted it neatly to the chin, clasped the springs back of the ears, added to it a gray wig, made easy-fitting by the short hair on the head, and once more handed Leslie the glass.
The young man looked. The last vestige of youth had departed, and he appeared as he might have expected to do thirty years later when he had touched sixty and gone on downward.
"Capital!" he said—"capital! If any man, or woman, knows me behind this disguise, there is some reason beyond nature for their doing so. There—throw me a hat—anything unlike my own—for I have already remained too long. I will see you again some time this evening." Handing the costumer a bill, with the air of one who had taken such accommodations before and knew what they cost, Leslie put on a respectable looking speckled Leghorn hat brought from the back room, took one more glance at his metamorphosis in the glass, and passed hurriedly out into the street and down Broadway towards Taylor's.
To return to that place for a few moments, after Tom Leslie had left it and before he was again heard from.
Josephine Harris sat for perhaps five minutes after the chocolate was brought, toying with the spoon and the cup, a little consciously red in face, and saying never a word—an amount of reticence quite as unusual for her, as ice in summer. Bell Crawford made two or three remarks, and she answered them with "Ah!" and "Humph!" till the other pouted a little sullenly and said no more.
At length the wayward girl shoved aside her cup, stopped nibbling a bon-bon, planted one elbow on the table, leaned her chin on her hand, and looked her companion full in the face with a comic earnestness that was very laughable.
"Bell," she said, "I am gone!"
"Gone?" asked the other. "What do you mean?"
"Sent for—done up—wilted—caved in—and any other descriptive words that may happen to be in the language!" was the reply.