looked away when he paid his fare, had a soft voice like a woman’s,—­had he seen anybody answering to some such description as this?  The gentlemanly conductor had not noticed,—­was always taking up and setting down way-passengers,—­might have had such a young man aboard,—­there was two or three students one day in the car singing college songs,—­he did n’t care how folks looked if they had their tickets ready,—­and minded their own business,—­and, so saying, he poked a young man upon whose shoulder a ringleted head was reclining with that delightful abandon which the railroad train seems to provoke in lovely woman,—­“Fare!”

It is a fine thing to be set down in a great, overcrowded hotel, where they do not know you, looking dusty, and for the moment shabby, with nothing but a carpet-bag in your hand, feeling tired, and anything but clean, and hungry, and worried, and every way miserable and mean, and to undergo the appraising process of the gentleman in the office, who, while he shoves the book round to you for your name, is making a hasty calculation as to how high up he can venture to doom you.  But Murray Bradshaw’s plain dress and carpet-bag were more than made up for by the air and tone which imply the habit of being attended to.  The clerk saw that in a glance, and, as he looked at the name and address in the book, spoke sharply in the explosive dialect of his tribe,—­

“Jun! ta’tha’genlm’n’scarpetbag’n’showhimupt’thirtyone!”

When Cyprian Eveleth reached the same hotel late at night, he appeared in his best clothes and with a new valise; but his amiable countenance and gentle voice and modest manner sent him up two stories higher, where he found himself in a room not much better than a garret, feeling lonely enough, for he did not know he had an acquaintance in the same house.  The two young men were in and out so irregularly that it was not very strange that they did not happen to meet each other.

The young lawyer was far more likely to find Myrtle if she were in the city than the other, even with the help of his cousin Edward.  He was not only older, but sharper, better acquainted with the city and its ways, and, whatever might be the strength of Cyprian’s motives, his own were of such intensity that he thought of nothing else by day, and dreamed of nothing else by night.  He went to work, therefore, in the most systematic manner.  He first visited the ship Swordfish, lying at her wharf, saw her captain, and satisfied himself that as yet nobody at all corresponding to the description of Myrtle Hazard had been seen by any person on board.  He visited all the wharves, inquiring on every vessel where it seemed possible she might have been looking about.  Hotels, thoroughfares, every place where he might hear of her or meet her, were all searched.  He took some of the police into his confidence, and had half a dozen pairs of eyes besides his own opened pretty widely, to discover the lost girl.