It was eleven o'clock on the Wednesday morning following that eventful Monday night. In an upper room, a private parlor of a Boston hotel, seated in an easy chair, was Miss Norine Bourdon. They had arrived this morning, and in the hotel book their names were registered "Mr. and Mrs.

John Laurence."

At the present moment Miss Bourdon is alone. Her dark face is very pale, her eyelids are red from much weeping; at intervals, as she sits and thinks, the lovely dark eyes fill, the childlike lips quiver, and a sob catches her breath. And yet she is not really very unhappy. Is she not with Laurence? Before another hour passes will she not be his wife? and what is the love of aunt or uncle, what the friendship of a thousand Mr.

Gilberts compared to the bliss of that? Truth to tell, the first shock of consternation at her enforced flight over, Norine had found forgiveness easy. She was only seventeen, remember; she was intensely romantic; she loved him with her whole, passionate heart--a heart capable, even at seventeen, of loving, and--who was to tell?--perhaps of hating very strongly. And most girls like bold lovers. It was a very daring _coup de main_, this carrying her off, quite like something in a last century novel, and with his tender, persuasive voice in her ear, his protecting arm about her waist, with her own heart pleading for him, Norine was driven away a not unwilling captive.

"I have arranged everything, my pet," said Mr. Thorndyke; "rooms are engaged at the W---- House, Boston, and a clerical friend of mine is to perform the ceremony very much on the quiet. You don't object to being married in a hotel parlor, and by a Congregationalist minister, do you?

By-and-by we'll take a run over the border and have the thing done over again in the sacred precincts of Notre Dame de Montreal, if you like.

Just at present everything must be _sub rosa_, my darling. The old boy--I mean my respected uncle Darcy--will cut up deuced rough, you know, when he first comes to hear it. He expects me to marry his pet, Nellie Holmes; so does Miss Nellie, if the truth must be told. So I would have done, too, if fate and a broken limb had not thrown me upon _your_ protection. And from that hour, my darling, my fate was sealed.

Of all the eyes, blue, black, brown, green, or gray, for killing, wholesale slaughter, commend me to those of a fair Canadian. So you see, Norry, we will be married Wednesday morning nicely on the quiet, and we'll go to a place I've engaged, over Chelsea way, down by the 'sad sea waves,' to spend the honeymoon. And there for one blessed month we'll forget all the uncles and aunts, all the lawyers and heiresses in Christendom, and 'do' love among the roses. You forgive me for carrying you off in this right knightly fashion--you do, don't you, Norry? Ah! I know you do; but look up, my own love, and tell me so, and so make my happiness complete."

With a little fluttering sigh Norine obeyed, clinging close to her hero's side in the darkness.

"But you'll let me write home when we are married, and tell them, Laurence, won't you? They have been so good to me, always--always, and they will think, oh yes, they will think such dreadful things of me now."

"They will forget and forgive, never fear, Norry. People always come round when they can't do anything else. Of course you shall write to them--of course you shall do for the future precisely as you wish, and I will only exist to fulfil your commands. But not just yet, you know; not until uncle Darcy relents and forgives. Because, my pet, I haven't a dollar in the world of my own, except my allowance from him, and I can't afford to offend him. But I'll soon bring him round. Let him see you once, and all will be forgiven. The man doesn't exist, old or young, who could resist _you_."

All this was very delightful, of course; and in such rose-colored, romance-flavored talk, the time sped on. Norine's spirits rose with the brisk drive in the teeth of the night gale. She was with Laurence; she was never to part from him more. All life held of rapture was said for her in that. It was rather a drawback, certainly, that she might not tell them at home of her felicity at once, but she would just drop them a line from Boston to say she was safe and well and happy, that they were not to worry about her, and to beg Mr. Gilbert's--poor Mr.

Gilbert's--pardon. That much Laurence would consent to, of course. To be married in a hotel parlor, by a Congregationalist Minister was also ever so little of a drawback, to a little French Canadienne, but one must not expect unalloyed earthly happiness. And had not Laurence said they would go one day to Montreal--dear old Montreal, and be remarried in Notre Dame? Then she would visit Aunt Hetty and Uncle Reuben; then she would go to New York and plead with Mr. Darcy for her beloved husband, and Mr.

Darcy would grant that pardon, and then--what then? Well, nothing then, of course, only live and be happy forever after! The sloop, in which Mr.

Thorndyke had engaged passage, was ready to sail. Norine was consigned to the care of the captain's wife for the trip, and was soon so utterly prostrate with _mal de mer_, that love and Laurence were forgotten.

To tell the truth, Mr. Thorndyke was miserably sea-sick himself; but this mode of travel had been forced upon him by the exigencies of the case. The pursuers must be thrown off the track. Gilbert would surely suspect and follow; if they went by rail, he would inevitably hunt them down. So, of necessity, he chose the sloop, and with a head wind and driving rain, spent Monday night, Tuesday, and Tuesday night sea-sick and prostrate. Wednesday morning came and they were in Boston. It came in pouring rain and leaden sky, and the bleak easterly wind your Bostonian dreads. They drove to the hotel, Miss Bourdon dreadfully ashamed of her old waterproof, and ascended to their private parlor. Mr.

Thorndyke ordered breakfast to be served here at once, and both partook of that repast when it came, with very excellent appetites. Mr.

Thorndyke had had some more brandy, which tonic, doubtless, stimulated his appetite, his resolution and his love together. Then he put on his hat, looked at his watch, and departed on matrimonial business intent.

"I'll be off for the Reverend Jonas Maggs (his name's the Reverend Jonas Maggs) at once, and make you Mrs. Thorndyke before you eat your dinner.

And I'll order a few things here--a hat, for instance, a sacque, and a few dresses and gloves. I'll be back in an hour or two at the longest.

You won't be lonely, my darling, while I'm gone?"

She had answered him "no," and with a very affectionate embrace, he had left her. But in his absence she did grow lonely, did grow saddened and remorseful. What must they think of her at home? They had discovered her flight by this time--all was consternation and terror. They would wonder what had happened--why she had gone, whither, and if alone. Aunt Hetty she could see weeping and refusing to be comforted; her uncles shocked, speechless, terrified; Mr. Gilbert pale, stern, and perhaps guessing the truth. He had loved her, very truly and dearly, and Thursday next was to have been his wedding day. Oh! what a cruel, wicked, heartless, ungrateful wretch she must be now in his sight! How he would scorn and despise her--how they all would! Would they ever forgive her for this shameful flight--this cold-blooded treachery? One day she might, perhaps, come face to face with Mr. Gilbert, in the busy whirl of New York life, and how would she ever dare to meet his angry, scornful eye?

As Laurence's wife, the deepest bliss life could give would be hers, but through all her life long, even in the midst of this bliss, the trail of the serpent would be over all still, in her undying shame and remorse.

The ready tears of seventeen fell, until all at once Miss Bourdon recollected that Laurence would be here presently with the clergyman, and that it would never do to be married with red eyes and a swollen nose. She sprang up, bathed her face, brushed out her long silky black hair, and by the time she had made herself pretty and bright, Mr.

Thorndyke's light step came flying up the stairs, three at a bound, and Mr. Thorndyke's impetuous tap was at the door.

"Come in," she said, her heart beginning to flutter, and the bridegroom came in, handsome, smiling, eager, followed by a seedy-looking personage in rusty black, and the professional "choker" of dingy white.

"Out of patience, Norine? But I could not come an instant sooner, and it is only half-past eleven. My friend, the Reverend Jonas Maggs, Miss Bourdon, soon to be transformed into Mrs. Laurence Thorndyke; and the sooner the better. Here's the ring, Norry, bought haphazard--let's see if it fits the dear little finger. So! as if you were born in it. Now then, Mr. Maggs, pity the impatience of ardent love, and get on with the ceremony."

High spirits these for a runaway match. The handsome face was flushed, the blue eyes feverishly bright, a strong odor of cigars and cognac pervaded Mr. Thorndyke's broadcloth. The Rev. Mr. Maggs coughed, a meek, clerical cough, looked furtively and admiringly at the bride, drew forth a book, and "stood at ease." Mr. Thorndyke drew Miss Bourdon up before him, the ring between his fingers, an odd sort of smile on his lips. For Norine, she had grown ashen white; now that the supreme moment had come, she was trembling from head to foot. Even to her inexperience there was something bizarre, something wrong and abnormal, in this _outre_ sort of marriage. A bride without bridal dress, veil or blossoms; without bridesmaid, or friend; a bridegroom splashed with mud and rain drops, without groomsman or witness. And the Rev. Mr. Maggs, for a holy man, was as dirty and disreputable a specimen of the class as one might wish to see. She stood by his side, pale to the lips, afraid of--she knew not what. As in a dream she heard Mr. Maggs gabbling over some sort of ceremony. As in a dream she saw the ring slipped over her finger. As in a dream she saw him shut up his book with a slap, and heard him pronounce them man and wife. Then for the first time she lifted her eyes, full, clear, questioning to the face of Laurence Thorndyke. For the first time, perhaps, in his own experience of himself he shrank before their crystal clear, childishly innocent gaze. His were still full of that intolerable light of triumph--that exultant smile yet lingered on his lips.

He drew Maggs aside and slipped a crisp greenback, into his hand. Then the reverend gentleman resumed his hat, bowed to the bride, wished her joy with an unctuous smile, and slowly took himself out of the room.

"My dear little wife!" Laurence Thorndyke said. "You have made me the happiest man in America to-day. For the next four weeks, in our pretty Chelsea cottage, it shall be our business to forget that the world holds another human creature than our two selves."

"And I've paid _you_ off, I think, my friend Gilbert, with compound interest." Mr. Thorndyke added, mentally, as a rider to that pretty little speech. "I'm not over and above rich this morning, but I'd give a cool hundred to see your face."

And so, while not half a mile off, Richard Gilbert and Reuben Kent were searching, with the aid of a detective officer, every hotel in Boston, a hack was rattling over the stones to Chelsea Ferry, bearing to their bridal home Laurence Thorndyke and Norine.

CHAPTER X.

"A FOOL'S PARADISE."

The little house was like a picture--like a doll's house, the whitest, the brightest, the trimmest, the tiniest of all tiny houses. It nestled down in a sheltered nook, with its back set comfortably against a hill.

Its pretty little garden full of pretty little flowers, climbing roses and scarlet-runners all over its inviting porch, and away beyond, Chelsea beach, like a strip of silver ribbon, and the dimpling sea, smiling back the sunshine. No other house within a quarter of a mile, the dim, dark woodland rising up in the back-ground, the big, bustling, work-a-day world shut out on every hand. Could Laurence Thorndyke, if he had searched for half a lifetime, have found a more charming, more secluded spot in which to dream out Love's Young Dream?

And the dream was pretty nearly dreamed out now.

For the fourth week had come, and the days of the honey month were drawing to a close. If the truth must be told, the honey had cloyed upon Mr. Thorndyke's fastidious palate before the end of the second week, had grown distasteful ere the end of the third--had palled entirely at the beginning of the fourth. In other words, the honeymoon business and doing "love in a cottage," buried alive here, was fast becoming a most horrible bore.

"If I had been very much in love with the girl," thought Mr. Thorndyke, communing with his own heart "it might have been different--even then, though, let it have been ever so severe a case of spoons, I don't think I could have stood another week of this deadly lively sort of thing. But I wasn't very much in love. If you know yourself, Laurence Thorndyke, and you flatter yourself you do, it isn't in you to get up a _grande passion_ for any body. There was Lucy West, there is Helen Holmes, here is Norine Bourdon. I don't believe you ever had more than a passing fancy for any of them, and your motto ever has been 'lightly won lightly lost.'"

He was lying upon a sofa, stretched at full length, his hands clasped behind his head, a cloud of cigar smoke half-veiling his handsome, lazy, bored face, his eyes fixed dreamily upon the sparkling sea. Down on the strip of tawny sand he could see Norine, looking like a Dresden china shepherdess in her white looped-up dress, some blue drapery caught about her, a jaunty sailor hat on her crushed dark curls, and a cluster of pink roses in her belt.

"She's very pretty, and all that," pursued this youthful philosopher and cynic, looking at her with dispassionate eyes, "but is the game worth the candle? Three weeks and two days, and I'm sick and tired to death of this place, and--alas! my pretty Norry--of you! 'Men were deceivers ever.' I suppose it was much the same in old Shakspeare's time as it is now. It is all very well to pay off Gilbert, and wipe out the old scores, but it is not at all very well to be disinherited by old Darcy.

If it comes to his ears it's all up with my chance of the inheritance, and my marriage with Helen. And, upon my word, I shouldn't like to lose Helen. She's good-looking, she's good style, she can talk on any subject under Heaven, and she's twenty thousand dollars down on her wedding-day. Yes, it will never do to throw up my chances there, but how to drop quietly out of this--that's the rub. There'll be the dickens to pay with Norine, and sometimes I've thought of late, gentle as she is, much as she loves me--and she does love me, poor little soul--that she's not one of the milk-and-water sort to sit down in a corner and break her heart quietly. I wish--I wish--I wish I had left her in peace at Kent Farm!"

She was beckoning to him gaily at that moment. He shook off his disagreeable meditation, put his long limbs down off the sofa, took his straw hat, and sauntered forth to join her.

The little house--Sea View Cottage, its romantic mistress had named it, was owned by the two Miss Waddles. The two Miss Waddles were two old maids. Miss Waddle the elder, taught school in Chelsea. Miss Waddle, the younger, was literary, and wrote sensation stories for the weekly papers, poor thing. In addition, they eked out their income by taking a couple of summer boarders, for people as a rule don't become millionaires teaching school or writing for the papers. Miss Waddle, the younger, immersed in ink and romance, looked after the young man with eyes of keen professional interest.

"How grumpy he looks," thought Miss Waddle; "how radiant _she_ looks.

He's tired to death of it all already; she's more and more in love with him every day. The first week he was all devotion, the second week the thermometer fell ten degrees, the third week he took to going to Boston and coming home in the small hours, smelling of smoke and liquor, this fourth he yawns in her face from morning until night. And this is what fools call the honeymoon. Moonshine enough, so far as I can see, but precious little honey."

Miss Waddle stabbed her pen down in the inkstand, took a deep and vicious dip, and plunged wildly into literature once more. Mr.

Thorndyke, listlessly, wearily and unutterably bored, joined the idol of his existence.

In the Chelsea cottage they were known as "Mr. and Mrs. Laurence." For Norine, she was radiantly happy--no weariness, no boredom for her. The honey grew sweeter to her taste every day; but then women as a rule have a depraved taste for unwholesome sweetmeats; the days Mr. Thorndyke found so long, so vapid, so dreary, were bright, brief dreams of bliss to her. She had written her short explanatory note home during the first week, and had given it to Laurence to post. Laurence took it, glad of an excuse over to Boston, and on the ferry-boat tore it into fifty minute fragments and cast them to the four winds of Heaven. Norine had written a second time, and a third. Her piteous little letters met the same fate. That was one drawback to her perfect Paradise--there was a second, Laurence's growing weariness of it all.

"If he should become tired of me; if he should repent his hasty marriage; if he should cease to love me, what would become of me?" she thought, clasping her hands in an agony. "Oh, mon Dieu! let me die sooner than that. I know I am far beneath him--such lovely, accomplished ladies as my darling might have married--but ah, not one of them all could ever love him better than poor Norine!"

She hid her fears; the tears she shed over their silence and unforgiveness at home were tears shed in solitude and darkness, where they might not offend or reproach him. She tried every simple little art to be beautiful and attractive in his sight. Her smiling face was the last thing he saw, let him quit her ever so often--her smiling face looked brightly and sweetly up at him let those absences be ever so prolonged. And they were growing more frequent and more prolonged every day. He took her nowhere--his own evenings, without exception now, were spent in Boston, the smallest of the small hours his universal hours for coming home. And not always too steady of foot or too fluent of speech at these comings, for this captivating young man was fonder of the rattle of the dice-box, the shuffling of the pack, and the "passing of the rosy" than was at all good for him.

"Laurence," Norine's bright voice called, "you know everything. Come and tell me what is this botanical specimen I have found growing here in the cleft of the rocks."

She held up a spray of blue blossom. Laurence looked at it languidly.

"I know everything, I admit, but I don't know that. If you had married old Gilbert now, my darling, your thirst for information might have been quenched. There isn't anything, from the laws of the nations down to the name of every weed that grows, he hasn't at his learned legal finger ends. Oh, Lord, Norry, what a long day this has been--fifty-eight hours if one."

He casts himself on the sands at her feet, pulls his hat over his eyes, and yawns long and loudly. Her happy face clouds, the dark, lovely eyes look at him wistfully.

"It is dull for you, dear," she says, tenderly, a little tremor in the soft, sweet tones; "for me the days seem all too short--I am so happy, I suppose." He glances up at her, struggling feebly with a whole mouthful of gapes.

"You _are_ happy, then, Norry, are you? Almost as happy as when at home; almost as happy as if you had married that ornament of society, Richard Gilbert, instead of the scapegrace and outlaw, Laurence Thorndyke?"