'Going away, are they?'
'Yassuh.'
There emerged from the hotel at this moment a man and a woman.
The darkey crossed the road and put the two satchels in the 'bus—and stood with his hand on the handle of the door, holding it wide open, waiting.
II
I watched the two strangers as they approached. When they reached the 'bus the man assisted the woman, in a somewhat formal yet indifferent way. She entered and took her seat nearly diagonally opposite to me. The man plunged his hand in his pocket, brought out a coin, and put it in the darkey’s hand, and stooping, for he was tall, entered the 'bus after her. It swayed a little perilously with his weight, and rocked quite a bit before he finally comfortably seated himself directly across from me.
The driver meanwhile had swung himself up on the high driver’s seat. He opened the peep-hole and looked down, then gathered the reins, and clucked to his horses, and the 'bus drove off.
If the town had interested me before, I forgot it now—forgot it quite in the attention, direct and indirect, which I gave to my fellow passengers.
The man was faultlessly dressed. Such clothes were not customary in that corner of the world. The neat derby, the band of which he was even now wiping with a lavender-edged silk handkerchief, was a thing foreign to those parts at that season, cheap straw hats being rather the rule. The tips of the fingers of a pair of new tan gloves were to be seen just looking out from the left breast-pocket of his well-buttoned light gray suit. I could see that he wore a white vest, and his shirt had a little hair-line of purple in it. His hands were large and very white and well kept, the fingers close fitted together. On one of them a conspicuous Mexican opal smouldered in a massive, very dark gold setting.
I have no words, even to this day, to describe the woman who sat a foot or two from him and to whom he addressed his remarks in an indifferently possessive manner.