Page:McClure's Magazine volume 10.djvu/388

574 Miss Porter rose, and crossed the room.

"Do you see that car," Edith asked, "down by the hospital? What color is it?"

"Blue," replied Miss Porter.

"Good," exclaimed the examiner. "Now, I am going out for my spin, and I am going to think all the time, and at about five minutes to five I shall ride up to that corner, and I shall signal to you which letter you are to post to Paul. If I wave my handkerchief, put the special delivery stamp on the white envelope and send it; and if I wave my blue scarf, then send the blue one."

"Child's play," Miss Porter commented, with a smile. "Why don't you take them both with you, and send the one you want to send yourself?"

"I should have to carry them in my pocket, which would spoil the hang of my skirt; and, besides, I might—I am in such an agony of doubt—send them both," the girl replied.

When she had gone, Miss Porter tried to settle down to the quiet reading which her soul loved; but after each paragraph she gave a startled look at the clock, fearing that her absorption might tempt the hands of the clock to more rapid movement than the government allows. At ten minutes of five, with a look of relief, she rose and went to the window. Promptly at the appointed time she saw Edith flash into sight around the corner of St. Luke's Hospital. The opera glasses which Miss Porter focused upon her, revealed her riding slowly about in a circle, fumbling at her jacket. Presently she turned her wheel so that it faced Miss Porter, and as she rode half up the street, and then turned and rode down again, a blue scarf floated steadily out in the October breeze, adding a new note of color to the red sunset clouds that were sending their glow over the Palisades and across the Hudson.

Miss Porter turned from the window as Edith wheeled away to the Boulevard.

At five o'clock there was in the hands of the postman a letter in a blue envelope, addressed:

", "S.S. 'Advance,' "West Twenty-seventh Street Pier, "New York."

Edith was back just in time to dress for dinner.

"We must go somewhere," she said to Miss Porter, who seemed inclined to protest. "I can't bear to be left alone with my thoughts any longer; I want a radical change of atmosphere and tone. Now, what do you say to our going after dinner to that place where that English music-hall singer is?"

Miss Porter said several things, and would have said several more had not Edith interrupted her with, "Yes, I know it's smoky and all that, but it's perfectly respectable, oh, perfectly; and I've often heard you say you were thankful that you were sufficiently emancipated to go without fear anywhere in New York where a respectable man would go. And from the point of view of my music, it is really my duty to go. The newspapers and the musical journals say it is really something new in the way of recitative singing."

The programme had already begun when she and Miss Porter took their seats quite far back in the music-hall, and gazed