A Pair of Patient Lovers by William Dean Howells
page 61 of 269 (22%)
page 61 of 269 (22%)
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naturally Gaites saw nothing of Miss Desmond's piano, which had come
into his mind again in starting. He did not know the colonnaded structure, with its stately _porte-cochère_, where his driver proposed to leave him, instead of the formless brick box which he remembered as the Sea Board Depot, and he insisted upon that when the fellow got down to open the door. "Ain't no Sibbod Dippo, now," the driver explained, contemptuously. "Guess Union Dippo'll do, though;" and Gaites, a little overcome with its splendor, found that it would. He faltered a moment in passing the conductor and porter at the end of the Pullman car on his train, and then decided that it would be ridiculous to take a seat in it for the short run to Burymouth. In the common coach he got a very good seat on the shady side, where he put down his hand-bag. Then he looked at his watch, and as it was still fifteen minutes before train-time, he indulged a fantastic impulse. He left the car and hurried back through the station and out through the electrics, hacks, herdics, carts, and string-teams of Causeway Street, and up the sidewalk of the street opening into it, as far as the S. B. & H. C. freight-depot. On the way he bet himself five dollars that Miss Desmond's piano would not be there, and lost; for at the moment he came up it was unloading from the end of the truck which he had seen carrying it past the window of his restaurant. The fact amused him quite beyond the measure of anything intrinsically humorous in it, and he staid watching the exertions of the heated truckman and two silk-capped, sarcastic-faced freight-men, till the piano was well on the platform. He was so intent upon it that his interest seemed to communicate itself to a young girl coming from the other quarter, with a suburban, cloth-sided, crewel-initialed bag in her |
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