This vehicle was driven by a young lady of decided beauty, with a spice of Amazonian spirit. She was rather slender and very straight, with a jaunty little hat and feather perched coquettishly above her dark brown hair, which was arranged in one heavy mass and confined in a silken net. Her complexion was clear, without brilliancy; her eyes blue as the ocean horizon, and spanned by sharp, characteristic brows; her mouth small and decisive; and her whole cast of features indicative of quick talent and independence.
Upon the seat beside her sat another damsel, leaning indolently back in the corner of the carriage. This one was a little fairer than the first, having one of those beautiful English complexions of mingled rose and snow, and a dash of gold-dust in her hair where the sun touched it. Her eyes, however, were dark hazel and full of fire, shaded and intensified by their long, sweeping lashes. Her mouth was a rosebud, and her chin and throat faultless in the delicious curve of their lines. In a word, she was somewhat of the Venus-di-Milo type; her companion was more of a Diana. Both were neatly habited in plain travelling-dresses and cloaks of black and white plaid, and both seemed utterly unconscious of the battery of eyes and eye-glasses that enfiladed them from the whole length of the piazza as they passed.
"Who are they?" asked Salsbury; "I don't know them."
"Nor I," said Burnham; "but they look like people to know. They must be somebody."
Half an hour later the hotel-office was besieged by a score of young men, all anxious for a peep at the last names upon the register. It is needless to say that our friends were not in the crowd. Ned Salsbury was no more the man to exhibit curiosity than Charley Burnham was the man to join in a scramble for anything under the sun. They had educated their emotions clear down, out of sight, and piled upon them a mountain of well-bred inertia.
But, somehow or other, these fellows who take no trouble are always the first to gain the end. A special Providence seems to aid the poor, helpless creatures. So, while the crowd still pressed at the office-desk, Jerry Swayne, the head clerk, happened to pass directly by the piazza where the inert ones sat, and, raising a comical eye, saluted them.
"Heavy arrivals to-night. See the turnout?"
"Y-e-s," murmured Ned.
"Old Chapman and family. His daughter drove the pony-phaeton, with her friend, a Miss Thurston. Regular nobby ones. Chapman's the steam-ship man, you know. Worth thousands of millions! I'd like to be connected with his family—by marriage, say!"—and Jerry went off, rubbing his cropped head and smiling all over, as was his wont.
"I know who they are now," said Charley. "Met a cousin of theirs, Joe
Faulkner, abroad two years ago. Doocéd fine fellow. Army."