"Yes, you must."
"One last kiss."
"One more--one long last kiss."
And there, entwined in each other's arms, with lips wedded and eyelids clinched, they clung together, forgetting everything past, future, or present. Love's anguish made them blind, mute, and deaf.
They did not hear the conductor crying his, "All Aboard!" down the long wall of the train. They did not hear the far-off knell of the bell. They did not hear the porters banging the vestibules shut. They did not feel the floor sliding out with them.
And so the porter found them, engulfed in one embrace, swaying and swaying, and no more aware of the increasing rush of the train than we other passengers on the earth-express are aware of its speed through the ether-routes on its ancient schedule.
The porter stood with his box-step in his hand, and blinked and wondered. And they did not even know they were observed.
CHAPTER IX
ALL ABOARD!
The starting of the train surprised the ironical decorators in the last stages of their work. Their smiles died out in a sudden shame, as it came over them that the joke had recoiled on their own heads. They had done their best to carry out the time-honored rite of making a newly married couple as miserable as possible—and the newly married couple had failed to do its share.
The two lieutenants glared at each other in mutual contempt. They had studied much at West Point about ambushes, and how to avoid them. Could Mallory have escaped the pit they had digged for him? They looked at their handiwork in disgust. The cosy-corner effect of white ribbons and orange flowers, gracefully masking the concealed rice-trap, had seemed the wittiest thing ever devised. Now it looked the silliest.