He had come round the unknown corner just ahead, and was walking straight toward her. She became aware of the beating of her heart. All this, it must be understood, was the very first time that Angela had taken out her Fordette alone.
Mr. Garrott was just off the train. Two hours in a day coach might have cramped his long legs; there might have been cinders down the back of his neck. Nevertheless, he advanced with an unmistakably lively tread, continually slapping his leg with a folded periodical of a size and shape like "Willcox's Weekly."
Nor was the coterie member's presence on the Wings' street mere blind chance, either. Those remarkable articles in the magazines about Cousin Mary, which had but popped as a rumor into one of Angela's ears and out the other, had naturally occupied a somewhat more prominent place in the thought of their creator. He remained, indeed, dazzled by the completeness of the write-ups' triumph.
Charles had stayed in the country four days longer than he had intended. And in his extended absence his whole mine of publicity had gone off with a brilliant suddenness that had startled him. The successful sale of the third write-up before he left town had assured a decisive coup, but the quick action the weeklies had given him went beyond all reason. He had not hoped that even the first of the write-ups could see print before the middle of the month, say; on the contrary, he had discovered the last and best of them—the one signed Charles King Garrott—on the train just now, in "Willcox's," for January 10th. In short, in the space of a Christmas holiday he, Charles, had spread the vindicating feats and features of his "demoted" friend to the four corners of the globe. Literally that, for did not the combined circulation of "Willcox's," the "Saturday Review," and "Hervey's National" exceed two million copies weekly (this on the word of the circulation managers themselves, a class of men whose consecration to the austerest veracity has passed into proverb)? Surely there remained few literate persons in the world to-day who could plausibly pretend that they had never heard of Mary Wing.
And Mary (as Angela had noted) had appreciated these extraordinary services to the full. The letter she had written him in the country, after the appearance of the "Saturday Review" article, was uniquely grateful. A beautiful letter Charles had thought it; he had it in his inside pocket now. And the interesting thought it had raised was this: If his usually independent friend could be as grateful as that for the write-ups, what would she say when his whole plan worked out, and his Public Opinion had overwhelmed the School Board for her? Thus, on the train, after reading "Willcox's" piece three times, and now as he strode up the quiet back-street from the station, the author was intently plotting out the next, or practical, stage of his campaign, still unsuspected by her: the stage of the reprinting of the write-ups in the local papers, in fine, of repeated editorial endorsement of the same, of the outburst of letters from "Indignant Taxpayers," "High School Graduates," and "Old Subscribers"—practically all, of course, written by Uncle George Blenso and himself.
His thoughts proved increasingly stimulating to the home-come Charles. And when he came to Olive Street, he suddenly bethought him to turn up that way; not expecting to stop at the Wings', of course (for he had an engagement to call there this evening, much as if he hadn't been a modern at all), but merely thinking that if he should happen to meet Mary it would be quite a pleasant thing....
Having turned, the buoyant young man presently sent, as it were, a scouting eye on ahead. And it fell, not upon the friend he had made famous in a night, but upon an Object approaching.
The object was a conveyance, a little vehicle of the self-propelling type. It was an automobile, clearly; a runabout, you would have to term it, though certainly of a pattern adopted in no recent year. So steep and bobbed was this runabout's little body, so quaintly archaic its contour, that it stirred in the beholder dim recollections of the early days of the horseless age, of strange pictures seen in scientific magazines back in the nineties. Very slowly the little vehicle approached, but very loudly, too, with an increasing bias toward the sidewalk, with queer rumblings and groanings, with the oddest snorts.
Charles's puzzled eye lifted. And so it was that it encountered again the soft gaze that he had last seen misted in tears, upon a sofa. And so he heard the pretty voice, that had once referred to him as a brute, saying:—