Book-bot.com - read famous books online for free

A Pair of Patient Lovers by William Dean Howells
page 61 of 269 (22%)
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
DigitalOcean Referral Badge