CHAPTER XVIII.
THE GUESTS AT THE HOTEL.
“Where will you be left, miss?” asked the good-humored driver, thrusting his head in at the window of the coach, in one corner of which Mildred sat, closely veiled and shrinking as far as possible from observation.
“At the Stevens Hotel,” she answered, and the driver returned:
“Oh, yes, Stevens Hotel. I have another passenger who stops there. Here he comes,” and he held open the door for a remarkably fine-looking man, who, taking the seat opposite Mildred, drew out a book in which for a time he seemed wholly absorbed, never looking up, except once indeed when a fat old woman entered and sat down beside him, saying, as she sank puffing among the cushions, that “she shouldn’t pester him long,—she was only going a mile or so to visit her daughter-in-law, who had twins.”
Involuntarily Mildred glanced at the gentleman, who, showing a very handsome set of teeth, again resumed his book, while she scanned his features curiously, they seemed to her so familiar, so like something she had seen before.
“Who is he?” she kept asking herself, and she was about concluding that she must have seen him in Boston, when the stage stopped again before one of those low-roofed buildings so common in New England, and the fat old lady alighted, thanking the gentleman for holding the paper of anise-seed and catnip, which all the way had been her special care.
Again the handsome teeth were visible, while the stranger hoped she would find the twins in a prosperous condition. On the green in front of the house a little child was waiting to welcome grandma; and Mildred, who was fond of children, threw back her thick brown veil to look at it, nor did she drop it again, for the road now wound through a mountainous district, and in her delight at the wild, picturesque scenery which met her view at every turn, she forgot that she was not alone, and when at last they reached the summit of a long, steep hill, she involuntarily exclaimed:
“Isn’t it grand?”