“Oh, I’m not going,” Archer answered.

“Not going?  Why, what’s happened?” Her voice was as clear as a bell, and full of wifely solicitude.

“The case is off—­postponed.”

“Postponed?  How odd!  I saw a note this morning from Mr. Letterblair to Mamma saying that he was going to Washington tomorrow for the big patent case that he was to argue before the Supreme Court.  You said it was a patent case, didn’t you?”

“Well—­that’s it:  the whole office can’t go.  Letterblair decided to go this morning.”

“Then it’s not postponed?” she continued, with an insistence so unlike her that he felt the blood rising to his face, as if he were blushing for her unwonted lapse from all the traditional delicacies.

“No:  but my going is,” he answered, cursing the unnecessary explanations that he had given when he had announced his intention of going to Washington, and wondering where he had read that clever liars give details, but that the cleverest do not.  It did not hurt him half as much to tell May an untruth as to see her trying to pretend that she had not detected him.

“I’m not going till later on:  luckily for the convenience of your family,” he continued, taking base refuge in sarcasm.  As he spoke he felt that she was looking at him, and he turned his eyes to hers in order not to appear to be avoiding them.  Their glances met for a second, and perhaps let them into each other’s meanings more deeply than either cared to go.

“Yes; it is awfully convenient,” May brightly agreed, “that you should be able to meet Ellen after all; you saw how much Mamma appreciated your offering to do it.”

“Oh, I’m delighted to do it.”  The carriage stopped, and as he jumped out she leaned to him and laid her hand on his.  “Good-bye, dearest,” she said, her eyes so blue that he wondered afterward if they had shone on him through tears.

He turned away and hurried across Union Square, repeating to himself, in a sort of inward chant:  “It’s all of two hours from Jersey City to old Catherine’s.  It’s all of two hours—­and it may be more.”

XXIX.

His wife’s dark blue brougham (with the wedding varnish still on it) met Archer at the ferry, and conveyed him luxuriously to the Pennsylvania terminus in Jersey City.

It was a sombre snowy afternoon, and the gas-lamps were lit in the big reverberating station.  As he paced the platform, waiting for the Washington express, he remembered that there were people who thought there would one day be a tunnel under the Hudson through which the trains of the Pennsylvania railway would run straight into New York.  They were of the brotherhood of visionaries who likewise predicted the building of ships that would cross the Atlantic in five days, the invention of a flying machine, lighting by electricity, telephonic communication without wires, and other Arabian Night marvels.