"Will you let me alone!" This to the gadfly, but to Mallory a dejected wail: "I—I just remembered. I haven't anything to pack."
"And you'll have to give back that waist to Mrs. Temple. You can't get off at Ogden without a waist."
"I'll go anyway. I want to get home."
"Marjorie, if you talk that way—I'll throw you off the train!"
She gasped. He explained: "I wasn't talking to you; I was trying to stop this phonograph." Then he rose, and laid violent hands on the annoyer, shoved him to the corridor, seized his bundle of papers from his arm, and hurled them at his head. They fell in a shower about the train-butcher, who could only feel a certain respect for the one man who had ever treated him as he knew he deserved. He bent to pick up his scattered merchandise, and when he had gathered his stock together, put his head in, and sang out a sincere:
"Excuse me."
But Mallory did not hear him, he was excitedly trying to calm the excited girl, who, having eloped with him, was preparing now to elope back without him.
"Darling, you can't desert me now," he pleaded, "and leave me to go on alone?"
"Well, why don't you do something?" she retorted, in equal desperation. "If I were a man, and I had the girl I loved on a train, I'd get her married if I had to wreck the——" she caught her breath, paused a second in intense thought, and then, with sudden radiance, cried: "Harry, dear!"
"Yes, love!"