Page:Tom Beauling (1901).pdf/187

 manage to live through it. But suppose your beloved was in the very next room, the wall of which was too thick to transmit sound, and you were compelled to wait there for ten days! It would be impossible. Your heart would knock out your sides, you would go mad as to your mind, and you would die after three quarters of an hour by the clock. If precisely that had happened to Beauling, he would have simplified matters by knocking the wall down; but what did happen was next-best bad. The quarantine officers brought out papers from the desired shore, and, a San Francisco "Social Topics" falling to the lot of Beauling, he learned that Mr. and Mrs. Dunbar of New York, with their daughter. Miss Phylis Dunbar, and a party of friends, transported thither in two palatial cars—the Lasca and the Weda—were at that moment at the Palace Hotel of the Metropolis of the Pacific Slope.

People knew him no longer, and fled when he approached. He had the port deck to himself, and there, barring occa-