Mary and John Are Married.
About two weeks after Caleb Saylor and Rosamond were married, John Cornwall left Harlan on a business trip for Boston and Pittsburgh. As he had never gone east over the C. & O., he concluded to travel that route, boarding the train at Winchester.
His intention was to travel direct to Boston, where he was to make settlement with the executors of the estate of Giusto Poggi, who had died some months before, a resident of that city. He had left $20,000.00 to Cornwall's client, Luigi Poggi, a miner living on Straight Creek near the old Saylor home.
After this settlement was made it was his intention to return home by way of Pittsburgh, stopping there to attend a stockholders' meeting of the Pittsburgh Coal & Coke Company, of which corporation he had been a director for more than three years.
As he took his seat in number 9 he saw that quite an attractive-looking young woman occupied the opposite section. Her face seemed quite familiar, in that she might have sat for the photograph which occupied so conspicuous a place on his bedroom dresser. He watched her, hoping that she might glance up from the book which claimed her whole attention.
On the front seat of her section, from beneath a summer wrap thrown over the back, the end of a small leather handbag protruded and on it he read; "M. E. S. Wellesley, Mass."
He felt a thrill of surprise and pleasure. Taking a second and very careful look at the lady, he was convinced that he had found the original of the photograph and discovered the identity of the attractive stranger, though it was more than twelve years since he had last seen her.
How Mary had changed! Her beauty was none the less than when he had first seen her, a rosy-cheeked mountain girl, who looked at every strange thing in wide-eyed, timid wonder; who blushed when she was spoken to; and finally, when her timidity wore away, talked with him in her crude mountain idioms and localisms. He felt sure that when this cultured creature, who radiated poise and refinement, should feel inclined to speak after a most formal introduction, her voice would be soft and low, her words precise and her accent give certain identity of Bostonian culture and residence.
So the mountain lawyer, too snubbed by even this thought to rise and speak, sat in confusion across the aisle and made timid inventory of the charm and grace of his traveling companion.
She looked up from her book at a screw head in the panel about two feet above John's head, with a fixed thoughtful glance that saw nothing else; and John blushed. Her dreamy brown eyes spoke of a shackled or slumbering soul, voluntarily enduring the isolation of cultured spinsterhood, in search for the higher life. He felt the cold, bony hand of death reach out and crush his dream of love. After another hour of observation, the sun came through the window and shed its bright warm rays upon her hair and he revived a bit when he discovered there the warmth and color and glow of the southland. She put down her book and walked down the aisle; then he saw that her figure, though tall and slender, possessed a freedom of movement, healthy vigor and curves that told of a clean and vigorous life from early girlhood. When she returned to her seat he studied her face with care and knew it as the one he had seen in his dreams for years and each time had yearned to kiss.