At that moment there was a rapid foot on the stairway above, and the house servant whom Eleanor had managed to keep in her interest spoke quickly at the door.
"If you please, Miss, doctor's carriage is coming through the gate from the Darby road. Thought you would like to know it." And as rapidly as she had come down, she ascended again to her employment in the attic.
"Oh, Carlton, you must not be seen here, now!" exclaimed the poor girl, her face all fright and anxiety, and herself apparently forgotten. Something in that look and tone smote the heart of Carlton Brand more deeply than it had ever been smitten by the sorrow and disgrace of his own situation; and with that feeling of intense compassion a new thought was born within him. "Yesterday I could not have done it—to-day I can!" he muttered, so low that the girl could not understand his words; then he said aloud, and speaking very rapidly:
"I cannot meet him, and you shall not! Throw something on your head and over your shoulders, quick; and come with me!"
For one instant the young girl gazed into his face as if in doubt and hesitation; but the repetition of a single word decided her:
"Quick!"
A glow of delight and surprise that had long been a stranger to her face, broke over it; she ran to the little bed-room adjoining the apartment in which they were speaking, threw on a black-silken mantle and a sober little hat that hung there, and was ready in an instant. In another Carlton Brand had seized her arm, hurried her out of the room, down the stairs, through the hall and out into the garden which lay at the north side of the house and extended down almost to the edge of the causeway. Dr. Pomeroy was driving down the lane leading from the Darby road, and was consequently on the opposite side of the house from the fugitives. Fugitives they may well have been called, though perhaps so strange an elopement had never before been planned—an elopement over a comparatively open country in the broad light of a summer noon, by two persons who held no tie of blood and no warmer feeling for each other than friendship, and who had not dreamed of such an act even five minutes before.
But those operations the most suddenly conceived are not always the worst executed. Necessity, if not genius, is often a successful imitator of that quality. When the doctor drove up at the gate in front of the house, his "ward" and her new companion were just dodging out of the tall bean-poles and shrubbery, over the garden fence, to the edge of the meadow; by the time he had fairly entered the house they were on the causeway and partially sheltered by the elders that ran along it and fringed the bank of the singing brook; and long before he could have discovered the flight and made such inquiries of the servants as might have directed his gaze in that direction, the lawyer in his strangely soiled and unaccustomed attire, and the girl so slightly arrayed for starting out on her travels in the world, were within the circle of woods before mentioned, stretching northward to the great road leading down to the city.