So saying, Mrs. Gervase went out to drive with the offender in question, behind a pair of sleek cobs, in a little buckboard of tawny wood with russet leather cushions and harness,—his latest present,—and soon, in cheerful companionship, forgot all sorrows amid such views of land and water as Sheepshead Point people think only Sheepshead Point can offer.
Chapter II
To reach Sheepshead Point, a boat steams daily, and several times a day, from a station on the line of a great railway skirting the eastern Atlantic coast. Issuing from a drawing-room car there, a young woman, dressed in a tight-fitting skirt and jacket of sailor blue, with a loose shirt of red silk belted around a taper waist, her small head with its sailor-hat half shrouded from view in a blue tissue veil, walked lightly ahead of Mr. Alan Grove and, attended by an elderly maid, went far forward to stand in the bows of the boat.
Grove, struck by the grace and distinction of her carriage, looked again, and then was conscious of an actual fierce jump of the heart.
"Can there be two of them?" he asked of his inner man. "Doctors tell you if you keep your body in good order, and your mind healthily at work, you will never see a ghost—and yet—that's the double of the woman who sailed away from me last Thursday; who's haunted me during the six madly misspent weeks since I had the misfortune to be told off to take her in to dinner. Oh! no, it isn't. Yes, it is—by Jove, it is Gladys Eliot."
He was never so astonished. Believing her to be at that moment on the ocean, nearing British shores, Grove was fairly staggered when Miss Eliot, turning, espied him and, by a graciously easy nod, summoned him to her side. Considering the manner of their parting a few weeks back, he wondered at himself for the immediate abjectness of his obedience.
It was a favorite phrase of Gladys Eliot's admirers to describe her as having a "Duchess of Leinster head and throat." Nature had certainly bestowed upon this daughter of nobody in particular in the Western Hemisphere a pose of a proud little head upon broad, sloping shoulders, as fine as that much-photographed great lady's. She had, in addition, a pair of innocent, Irish-blue eyes and a guileless smile; a voice, in speaking, that was sweet and low; and the best or worst manners in the world, so critics said, according to the desirableness of her interlocutor.
"Mr. Grove! How perfectly extraordinary that you should be here," she exclaimed, giving him the tips of her well-gloved fingers, while the maid and dressing-bag withdrew discreetly into the background.
"Did you expect me to remain forever on the steps of the Claremont tea-house, like a monument of a city father, to adorn the suburbs of New York?"
"You are so quick-tempered, so unreasonable! How should I know you were going to take such dire offence? But please—I can't quarrel away off here, or even justify myself. If you are going to remain furious with me, at least gratify my curiosity first, and tell me how you came on this boat, and where you are going. Then, if you are so inclined, you may retire into your shell and sulk."