As we took the train for Long Branch we realised that we had plunged midmost into the action that would put all our theories to the test....

I looked at my woman with a sidelong glance, as she sat beside me on the train seat....  She was so pretty, so frail, so feminine that I pitied her, while at the same time my heart swelled with tenderness for her, and with pride of possession.  For she was mine now without dispute.  She, for her part, spoke but little, except illogically to upbraid Penton Baxter, as if he had perpetrated an ill on two people thoroughly innocent.

I was angry with him on other grounds ... he was not playing the radical game, but taking advantage of the rules of the conventional world.

With a fugitive sense of pursuit, we hired a cabby to drive us to a summer boarding house at Long Branch ... where Hildreth and I rented a single large room for both of us....

And there Hildreth immediately went into hysterics, and did nothing but weep.  While I waited on her hand and foot, bringing up food to her because she was sensitive about the probability of people recognising her.

We stayed there a week.  Each day the papers were full of our mysterious disappearance ... reporters were combing the country to find us.  Reports of our being in various places were sent in by enterprising local correspondents....

Again we entrained ... for Sea Girt.

An old cabman who drove a dilapidated rig hailed us with uplifted whip.

“We are looking for a place to board.”

“I’ll take you to a nice, quiet place, just suited to two home-loving folks like you,” he replied, thinking he had paid us a compliment, and whipping up his ancient nag.

Hildreth gave me a nudge and a merry look and it pleased me to see she still had her sense of humour left.

That night, as I held her in my arms, “Don’t let these little, trivial inconveniences and incidents—­the petty persecutions we are undergoing, have any effect on our great love,” I pleaded.

“That’s all very well, darling Johnnie, but where are we going to?”

“We’ll find a cottage somewhere ... a pretty little cottage within our means,” I replied, visioning a vine-trellised place such as poets and their brides must live in.

“Our money is giving out ... soon we’ll have—­to turn back to New York!”

“If we do, that need not part us....  I’ll get a job on some newspaper or magazine and take care of you.”

* * * * *

When I called for my mail at the Sea Girt post office, sure of hearing from Darrie, anyhow,—­who promised us she would keep us posted, I found no letter.  And the man at the window was certain he had handed over several letters addressed to me to someone else who had called for them, giving my name as his.

A wave of hot anger suffused my face.  How stupid of me not to have noticed it before.  Now I remembered the men who had followed us.