Mrs. Macartney was speechless for the first time in her life. She turned from him with a shudder, as if to say, you are a dangerous man, and hailed an agile young official who was pursuing a comet-like career over trunks and boxes and leaving a trail of white chalk marks behind him.
At her signal he bore down upon her box with bewildering rapidity, opened it, and with long cunning fingers extracted therefrom every dutiable article. The new gloves still stitched together, the silk and linen and dainty trifles still in the wrappers in which they had come from the Dublin shops, lay in a heap before him.
“Twenty dollars,” he ejaculated, and she had with his assistance mechanically abstracted from her purse a sufficient amount of the foreign currency to pay him, and he had given her box the pass mark and was away before she realized the extent of the weakness which she had displayed in not uttering one word of protest.
With a sigh of dismay she turned and met Vivienne’s eye. They had had many jokes together and with a simultaneous impulse they began to laugh.
“’Tis a country of surprises, me dear girl,” said Mrs. Macartney wagging her head. “Ah, Geoffrey, hear a tale of distress,” and looking at Captain Macartney, who suddenly appeared before them, she poured her troubles in his always sympathetic ear.
Vivienne was listening with interest when amid all the bustle and excitement she felt her guardian’s cold eye upon her.
“Your boxes are marked,” he said; “will you come now?”
With a hasty good-bye to her friends the girl followed him from the building.
A few sleighs and cabs were drawn up in the shadow of a square warehouse that stood at the head of the wharf. Before one of these sleighs Mr. Armour stopped. A coachman in an enormous fur cape and with his head half hidden in a heavy cap hurried from his seat and went to the horse’s head.
Mr. Armour assisted Vivienne into the sleigh, then gathered up the reins in his hands and placed himself beside her. The coachman sprang to the back seat and they passed slowly under a black archway and emerged into long Water Street that follows closely the line of wharves running from one end of the old colonial town to the other.