"Had we not better wait, then, for the week to expire?"
"Fiddlesticks! Don't you see that I want to give you a chance? What I am really afraid of is that I shall change my own mind. Father said only yesterday he was thinking of taking me to England at once. If you don't want to take your chances you can take your consequences instead."
It did not seem anything new or strange to Jack that she should give a little stamp of her foot imperiously, and in all the willfulness of a spoiled child determine suddenly upon carrying out a whim in spite of any objections. And Jack needed no great force of argument to push him on in this matter. His head was throbbing with excitement. To think of the bank was habitual to him; but the wildness of the new move commended itself to his young blood. The holidays were a mere matter of arrangement, for the most part, between the clerks, and he thought he saw his way to arranging for a fortnight's absence. "I'll make it all right," he said, thinking aloud. "I will arrange it with Sappy."
Whether "Sappy" was the bank manager or a fellow-clerk did not at the moment interest Nina.
"Why, Nina, I didn't know you were a person to go in for anything half so wild. It suits me. It will be the spree of my life! But how have you arranged everything? or have you arranged anything?"
"Oh, there is nothing very much to arrange. I know you can not leave the bank finally without giving due notice. So we will just go off now and get married, and when you come back, after a week or so, you can give the usual notice and then we will go to California. If your brother there wants you to go into the grape-farming he must know well enough that you have better chances there than here in the bank, and if, after all, the business there did not get on well, I dare say father will have changed his mind by that time."
"And how will you account for your absence from home?"
"Nothing simpler," said she, with a sagacious toss of her head. "I am just telegraphing to Sophronia B. Hopkins at Lockport, New York. You remember Sophronia B., when she was with us? I have telegraphed that I am coming to see her. She will answer to say 'Come along'; and then I will put her off for a couple of weeks and tell her to keep any letters forwarded for me from here until I come."
Jack was astonished. "I thought your head was only valuable as an ornament," said he, with affectionate rudeness.
"I have never, with you, had occasion to use it before. To-morrow, at half-past seven in the morning, you will take the train for Hamilton. I will take the 9.30 and we will go through to Buffalo together, where we will arrive about two o'clock, and then we can be married there and go West. But we need not arrange anything more now. You will be at the Campbells' to-night, and anything further can be spoken about there. Go off now to the bank and get everything ready. And, by the way, Jack"—here she held out her hand as if for good-by—while she asked, with what seemed to Jack an almost unimaginable coquetry and beauty, "you won't change your mind, dear Jack?" She gave him one glance from under her sweeping eyelashes, and then she left him to grope his way to the bank.