AFTER that one exclamatory lapse from Briticism, the tweed-clad man sat speechless, struggling to regain command over his shattered sensibilities. In this laudable endeavor he was severely handicapped by his vis-À-vis. She had turned the chair next his and was now seated facing him with parted lips, fluttering color, and lovely, desperate, suppliant eyes, a picture to divert the most determined attempt at concentration.

“Please! Please,” she implored, like a child, holding out her small, quivering hands to him. “Won't you speak to me?”

“Why—er—to be sure! To be sure! What shall I say, for choice?”

“Anything. Weather. Politics. 'Shakespeare and the musical glasses.' Only, talk!”

“But I'm afraid—er—there's some beastly mistake, you know.”

“Pretend it isn't,” she urged. “Oh, help me pretend it isn't.”

There was the sound of a clicking latch back of her, and the tension of the girl's face relaxed a little. A second click in front indicated a similar closure of Drawing-Room B.

Darcy took a long breath. No longer under observation, she enjoyed a truce in which to lay her plans. Incidentally she did her newly wed friends the gross injustice of rejoicing that Pullman doors have no keyholes.

“Now I can explain,” said she composedly. “Pray do.” There was lively interest in his tone.

“No, I don't know that I can, either. I'm afraid you won't understand.”

“Give me a sporting chance at it.”

How very English he was! Had he been American, she might have appealed to his sense of the jocular and absurd. No hope with this ultra-British solemnity.

“Well,” she began desperately, “there' are some people in this car that I don't want to see.”

“In the—er—compartment?”

“In both compartments. And they mustn't see me.”

“Quite so.”

“But they've already seen me.”

“Awkward, that,” he murmured.

“Not so awkward as if they'd seen me alone. They've seen us. Together.”

“But—er—it's no end nice of you, you know, and—and all that sort of thing. But why together?”

“That's what I'm trying to explain.” She looked at him doubtfully. “I'm finding it rather hard.”

“Perhaps you're not supposed to be traveling alone,” he suggested.

“Now, that's quite clever of you!” Darcy beamed gratitude upon him. “I'm not. But I started alone and—and—”

“You were to meet a—a companion who failed you?” He was really striving to be helpful, but Darcy felt herself getting in deeper and deeper.

“No: that isn't it, at all.”

“Then—er—I may be beastly stupid, but—er—really—” Blank bewilderment was expressed in every feature of his face including the monocle.

“Not at all,” returned the girl politely. “No wonder you find it puzzling. It's quite involved.” Then she took the plunge. “I'm eloping.”

“Eloping?” Her vis-À-vis dropped his monocle, replaced it, and stared at Darcy. “Eloping! Impossible!”

“Why impossible? Don't you elope in England?”

“Er—personally, seldom. And never alone.”

Was there a twinkle behind the monocle? Were the jokesmiths wrong about the English lack of humor? Or had she, happily, encountered a phenomenon? Darcy embraced the hope and changed her strategy in the midst of the assault.

“Here's your chance,” she said with calm effrontery. “You see, my—the other person in my elopement failed to live up to his opportunity.”

Her companion was understood to reflect adversely upon the sanity of the recreant.

“So,” pursued the girl, her color flushing and paling, but her eyes unflinchingly steady, “if you would—oh, please don't think me dreadful!—if you could just pretend to be the man! It's only for a little while,” she pleaded. “Just until we can get away from those people. Will you?”

“I will,” he said solemnly.

“I wish you wouldn't say that as if—as if we were in church,” protested the startled Darcy, plaintively.

“Ah, yes; by the way, have we been?”

“Have we been what?”

“To church.”

“This isn't Sunday.”

“No; but you say that we are eloping.”

“Just for the present.”

“Quite so. But is this—er—before or after?”

“Before or—Oh!!” Comprehension flooded the girl's mind and colored her cheeks simultaneously. “After,” she said, in a small, gaspy voice. “We—we're married.”

“Buck up!” exhorted her companion. “Don't take it so hard. It will soon be over. I merely wished to know, in case any question arose. When?”

“Ye—ye—yesterday. I mean, this morning.”

“Best stick to yesterday,” he advised kindly. “Before 9 a.m. is too early for probability.” He leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes.

“You're not growing faint under the strain, I hope?” inquired Darcy, recovering her spirits.

“It isn't that,” he replied dreamily. “I am only thinking that things like this do not happen to people. I shall count three, and if you're still there I shall know—well, I shall know that my mind is failing—and be glad of it.”

Darcy began rather to like her accomplice. He was really quite nice—though old. “Count ten,” she advised. “It's a better test.”

He began to count slowly, and an elderly lady who came down the aisle to take the chair opposite hastily sought the porter with a view to having her seat changed. When he had declaimed “Ten” and opened his eyes, the quite startling exclamation which followed convinced the old lady that her caution was well judged. The enumerator had found himself facing emptiness.

“Turn around,” directed a soft voice behind him.

He pivoted. “Oh!” he exclaimed in the most flattering tones of relief.

“The door of Drawing-Room B was getting nervous,” she said. “So I changed. I don't want them to catch my eye. They might come out to speak to us.”

“Come one, come all,” declaimed the other; “this chair shall fly from its firm base as soon as I.”

“Fine poetry,” granted the girl. “But this is prose.”

“Nothing of the sort, if you'll pardon me. Impossible and glorious romance. Words by Lewis Carroll. Music by Lohengrin. Mr. Brit-ling is for seeing it through.”

“Mr. Britling—if you're sure that Mr. H. G. Wells would be willing to lend you the name—”

“I'll chance it.”

“Then Mr. Britling doesn't know his part yet and might get poor me into awful difficulties. No, we must get out of this car.”

“Stamford the next stop,” said the porter, who had overheard in passing.

“Can you put us into another car?” Darcy asked him.

“Farther away from the restaurant car,” added her companion, and she thanked him with a glance for his shrewdness. If they were between the “Chorea” and the diner, her friends would pass them at luncheon-time.

“Dey's a obsehvation cah, reah cah,” suggested the porter. “No extra chahge.”

Darcy immediately rewarded him with a dollar. “If any one inquires about us,” she said, “tell them that we got off at New Haven.”

“Yassum. What name please, maddum?”

“No name. The lady and gentleman in 14 and 16.”

Fortune had left vacant for their coming a semi-retired alcove in the observation car. Therein ensconced, they took breath and thought and stock of each other.

“Now, if you don't mind,” said the man. “Who am I?”

“Your name is Veyze,” answered the girl, dimpling. “You're English. You're awfully English! You're as English as—as yourself.”

“Happy coincidence! Mayn't I have more than one name?”

“A full allowance. Sir Montrose Veyze, of Veyze Holdings, Hampshire.”

“I say! Then I've come into the title.”

“Quite a while ago. What you were before your succession, you know better than I.”

He caught the point. “Rodney Carteret, at your service,” he replied. “Here on a short stay. Diplomatic affairs.”

“Well, Mr. Carteret, I'll remember you forever, for helping me out of an awful scrape. It must seem dreadfully flitter-headed and bad taste and ill-bred—”

“I can imagine you being flitter-headed—odd words you Americans use—but I really can't conceive of you doing anything ill-bred or in bad taste,” said he with such sincerity that the girl flushed again.

“That's nice of you,” she responded gratefully, “considering what I've done to you.” Thereupon she proceeded to repay his courtesy by a tissue of fabrications which did credit to her long practice in mendacity.

“You wouldn't understand our American humor,” she wound up; “but I put up a joke on my friends in the other car by pretending I was to be married yesterday. I won't bore you with the circumstances. I was going away for a trip all by my little self and they were to think it was my wedding trip. Who would have thought there could be such awful luck as to find them on my train? And me without a ghost of a husband to show on my honeymoon—until I grabbed you!”

“Then you're not actually married or betrothed or anything of the sort?” he inquired with lively hopefulness.

“Oh, but I am engaged,” she answered, reverting to her original fiction. “My fiancÉ is on duty and can't get away. As soon as he comes over we're to be married. Now, please, do you think it's very awful? You've been so good, I should hate to have you despise me.”

“Oh, I'm no sort of a despiser,” he assured her. “And if I felt like doing a bit of despising, I'd go out in the woods and despise a toad. Certainly I shouldn't try my hand on anything as plucky and resourceful as you.”

“Resourcefulness is good as far as it goes,” said she. “But could I carry the thing through if my friends come back here and I have to present you?”

“I shouldn't concern myself about that,” he comforted her. “Surely they won't come.”

“Why not?”

“Bridal touring couples don't commonly go about seeking other companionship, do they?” Darcy stared. “How do you know they are on their bridal trip? I never told you.”

“Surmised it from something my friend, Mr. Thomas Harmon told me.”

“Do you know Mr. Harmon?”

“Rah-ther! I'm on my way to his place.”

“What place?” gasped Darcy.

“Boulder Brook, he calls it. It's up on the edge of the mountains.”

The girl leaned back, closed her eyes, and began to count slowly: “One—two—three—four—”

“I say,” broke in the partner of her plot. “Let a chap in on this. What's wrong?”

“You said it just now: 'These things do not happen to people.' You were right. They don't. Anyhow, they ought not to be allowed to. Five—six—seven—Oh, there's no use counting ten on this.” She opened her great, gray-blue eyes wide upon him. “So'm I,” she announced.

“So'm you what?”

“Going to Boulder Brook.”

Barely in time did he check the natural rejoinder, “So are your friends, the bridal couples,” for he bethought himself that, if she knew, she would doubtless escape from the train at the first station and this astounding and priceless adventure would be abruptly terminated. Instead he said:

“May I take you over with me? I'm having a car at Laconia.”

“Mr. Harmon is having me met at Weirs. Weirs is miles nearer.”

“Then perhaps you wouldn't mind giving me a lift with you. I'm for the Bungalow, wherever that is.”

“And I'm for the Farmhouse, and the chaperonage of Mrs. Bond. So it isn't as terribly compromising as it sounds, is it? Though what in the world Mr. Harmon would think, if this ever got to his ears—”

“It won't. In any case, Harmon is not a thinker of evil.”

Nevertheless the girl saw trouble in his eyes. Partly it was her innocence, partly the bravado to which the emergency of the day had strung her, which kept that same trouble out of her own eyes. With him it attained speech.

“How old are you?”

Across his shoulder Darcy's eye caught a number on the paneled side of the car. “Twenty-six,” she lied promptly.

He was taken aback. “Really!” he murmured. “I should have said—aw—much' younger. Are you sure you appreciate the possible—well—er—misconstructions to which this visit might give rise?”

“I don't see why it should,” returned Darcy stoutly. “Anyway, I've no other place to go.”

“But I could put off my trip.”

“That would be a nuisance to you, wouldn't it?”

“To be quite frank, it would be rather more than that. I should risk getting caught.”

“Caught?” echoed Darcy interestedly. “It sounds thrilling. Are you a fugitive from justice?”

“No. I'm a fugitive from injustice. See here, Miss Romancia, I'm something of a faker myself. Being up against it good, I'm going to 'fess up.

“'Faker'? 'Up against it'? Why—why, where's your English accent gone?”

“Cut out. Pretty soon I'm going to do the same with these whiskers. They tickle.”

So many surprises had been forced upon Darcy that, inured to them, she was able to sustain this one unperturbed. “It's a wonderful disguise,” she approved. “And you play the part beautifully. But, if the question isn't indiscreet, why?”

“As I indicated, I'm flying for my life.”

“Then I hope it's something thrilling like murder or arson, and not something petty like bigamy or fancy finance.”

“Nothing as interesting as crime. I'm wanted as a witness in a will case. They're trying to catch me and put me on the stand and make me testify that my great-uncle was a crafty and vicious old lunatic.”

“When he wasn't? How horrid!”

“When he was. That's horrider. And that others of my relatives were rouÉs and scandalmongers and drunkards.”

“I seem to have eloped into a nice cheerful sort of family,” observed the girl.

“It'll be a lot less cheerful if they ever get me on the stand. My lawyer was to have warned me in time to get away, but the other side stole a march on him, and I barely managed to sneak out in this disguise. So I was going to lie low at Harmon's place until they gave up the chase. But as matters are, I can stick to my whiskers and my accent a while longer. And, really, much as I should like to continue this prose poem of ours, I think that for the sake of—well, of appearances, I'd better go on somewhere else. Unless you're quite sure that Mrs. Bond is there and—”

“She is,” broke in Darcy. “I've had a telegram.”

“In that case—”

“In that case, you come along in the car with me. I won't have your trip spoiled. Besides, don't you think I have some curiosity in my make-up? I've got to see you without yours, or perish!”

There was no irruption of the newly-weds to complicate matters. The pseudo-weds had sandwiches and ginger ale in the observation car and sat there getting better acquainted and more content with each other until the “Chorea's” porter sought them out.

“Drawin'-rooms is bofe gone,” he said. “A got off at Ashlan' an' B lef' at Meredith. S'pi-cioned you-all might lak to know.”

His suspicion brought its reward. Ten minutes before the arrival at Weirs, Darcy's confederate excused himself.

“You get out by yourself,” he said. “I'll join you on the platform.”

Not yet comprehending, she followed instructions. Shortly after, there descended in front of the jaw-loose and petrified porter the ultra-British ulster, and the forceful tweed suit, enclosing not a bewhiskered, monocled, and blond Englishman, but a smooth-faced, pleasant-visaged young man who looked out upon the world from his own unaided, keen, and twink-ing eyes.

As the train pulled out with the porter still bulging, incredulous, from the door, the changeling turned to join his self-appointed bride.

“How do you do, Mr. Remsen?” said she.

For the second time that day sheer amazement loosed the hinges of Mr. Jacob Remsen's knees, and the wellsprings of Mr. Jacob Remsen's sincere American speech.

“Well, I am jiggered!” gasped Mr. Jacob Remsen, tottering back against a truck.