"George," said he, "bring my luggage in here."
And then he wondered at his addressing the porter in that drummer-like way—he was already acting up to the smart suit—or down; he was in doubt as to which it was.
The bags, when produced, showed those metal slides, sometimes seen, concealing the owner's name. Sweat stood on Florian's brow as he slipped the plate back and found the name of Eugene Brassfield, Bellevale, Pennsylvania! A card-case, his pocketbook, all his linen and his hat—all articles of expensive and gentlemanly quality, but strange to him—disclosed the same name or initials, none of them his own. In the valise he found some business letterheads, finely engraved, of the Brassfield Oil Company, and Eugene Brassfield's name was there set forth as president and general manager.
"Great heaven!" exclaimed Florian, "am I insane? Am I a robber and a murderer? During this time which has dropped out of my life, have I destroyed and despoiled this gentleman, and—and run off in his clothes? I must denounce myself!"
The porter came, and, by way of denouncing himself, Mr. Amidon clapped his waistcoat shut and buttoned it, snapped the catches of the bags, and pretended to busy himself with the letters in his pockets; and in doing so, he found in an inside vest-pocket a long thin pocket-book filled with hundred-dollar bills, and a dainty-looking letter. It was addressed to Mr. Eugene Brassfield, was unstamped, and marked, "To be Read En Route."
There was invitation, there was allurement, in the very superscription. Clearly, it seemed, he ought to open and examine these letters. They might serve to clear up this mystery. He would begin with this.
"My darling!" it began, without any other form of address—and was not this enough, beloved?—
"My own darling! I write this so that you may have something of me, which you can see and touch and kiss as you are borne farther and farther from me. Distance unbridged is such a terrible thing—any long distance; and more than our hands may reach and clasp across is interstellar space to me. You said last night that all beauty, all sweetness, all things delectable and enticing and fair, all things which allure and enrapture, are so bound up in little me, that surely the very giants of steam and steel would be drawn back to me, instead of bearing you away. Ah, my Eugene! You wondered why I put my hands behind me, and would not see your out-stretched arms! Now that you are gone, and will not return for so long—until so near the day when I may be all that I am capable of becoming to you, let me tell you—I was afraid!
"Not of you, dearest, not of you—for with all your ardor of wooing (and no girl ever had a more perfect lover—I shall always thank God for that mixture of Lancelot and Sir Galahad in you which makes every moment in your presence a delight), I always knew that you could leave me like a sensible boy, and, while longing for me, stay away. But I—whom you have sometimes complained of a little for my coldness—had I not looked above your eyes, and put my hands behind me, I should have clung to you, dear, I was afraid, and never have allowed you to go as you are now going, and made you feel that I am not the perfect woman that you describe to me, as me. Even now, I fear that this letter will do me harm in your heart; but all the lover in me—and girls inherit from their fathers as well as from their mothers—cries out in me to woo you; and you must forget this, only at such times of tenderness as you will sometimes have while you are gone, when one embrace would be worth a world. Then read or remember this, as my return-clasp for such thoughts.
"Besides, may I not, now that you are away from me, give you a glimpse of that side of my soul which a girl is taught to hide? This was the 'swan's nest among the reeds' which Little Ellie meant to show to that lover who, maybe, never came. Ah, Mrs. Browning was a woman, and knew! (Mind, dear, it's Mrs. Browning I speak of!)