"I will simply forward any further Amoy enclosures to Miss Worthington for her own action. The drama is done, the curtain has fallen, and the lights are turned out forever!"
Mr. and Mrs. John Witherspoon were enjoying the delights of a
Continental run a year later, when that bright-eyed young matron,
Madame Francine, read to her delighted husband the account given by
Miss Worthington of the opening of the "Free Hospital and Orphans'
Home," to which the young heiress had dedicated the estate of the
unfortunate Ferris, as well as a large sum set aside by herself.
The Witherspoons were in the far niente, floating on the Grand
Canal in beautiful Venice, while the young beauty selected Alice's
letter from a sheaf handed to them by the porter of the Hotel
Danieli, who pursued them in a gondola.
The married lovers were now on their way to the Nile and the eternal glow of its cloudless skies.
Witherspoon listened with a mock gravity, until he suddenly interrupted, "What does she say of Atwater?"
"Nothing," answered the merry matron. "It's all about the grand opening of the Home."
"Then, IT'S ALL RIGHT!" calmly answered Jack, lighting a cigar and leaning back under the parti-colored awning. "When a woman says nothing about a man, it's surely all right. I can wait, wait patiently, till her philanthropic fever abates. I suppose that we will hear something at the First Cataract, or at Khartoum, or some other remote spot, perhaps where the lion basks upon the tomb of ruined Palmyra! There is a happy crisis approaching 'in the near future,' as the swell journals say."
There were many interesting details lost to the runaway lovers by their wanderings, but the essential facts finally reached them in Calcutta, on their homeward way around the world.
Neither Alice Worthington nor the man who was now her coadjutor in many noble works could ever exactly recall the sequence of the events which had prolonged indefinitely Atwater's stay in Detroit.
But it had happened upon a winter evening, when the great Worthington mansion was silent, and Mrs. Hayward, Alice's duenna and general almoner, had artfully stolen away, leaving the unconscious lovers together.