In the Midst of Alarms

When Yates kissed Kitty good-night at the gate, he asked her, with some trepidation, whether she had told anyone of their engagement.

“No one but Margaret,” said Kitty.

“And what did she say?” asked Yates, as if, after all, her opinion was of no importance.

“She said she was sure I should be happy, and she knew you would make a good husband.”

“She’s rather a nice girl, is Margaret,” remarked Yates, with the air of a man willing to concede good qualities to a girl other than his own, but indicating, after all, that there was but one on earth for him.

“She is a lovely girl,” said Kitty enthusiastically. “I wonder, Dick, when you knew her, why you ever fell in love with me.”

“The idea! I haven’t a word to say against Margaret; but, compared with my girl–”

And he finished his sentence with a practical illustration of his frame of mind.

As he walked alone down the road he reflected that Margaret had acted very handsomely, and he resolved to drop in and wish her good-by. But as he approached the house his courage began to fail him, and he thought it better to sit on the fence, near the place where he had sat the night before, and think it over. It took a good deal of thinking. But as he sat there it was destined that Yates should receive some information which would simplify matters. Two persons came slowly out of the gate in the gathering darkness. They strolled together up the road past him, absorbed in themselves. When directly opposite the reporter, Renmark put his arm around Margaret’s waist, and Yates nearly fell off the fence. He held his breath until they were safely out of hearing, then slid down and crawled along in the shadow until he came to the side road, up which he walked, thoughtfully pausing every few moments to remark: “Well, I’ll be–” But speech seemed to have failed him; he could get no further.

He stopped at the fence and leaned against it, gazing for the last time at the tent, glimmering white, like a misshapen ghost, among the somber trees. He had no energy left to climb over.

“Well, I’m a chimpanzee,” he muttered to himself at last. “The highest bidder can have me, with no upset price. Dick Yates, I wouldn’t have believed it of you. You a newspaper man? You a reporter from ‘way back? You up to snuff? Yates, I’m ashamed to be seen in your company! Go back to New York, and let the youngest reporter in from a country newspaper scoop the daylight out of you. To think that this thing has been going on right under your well-developed nose, and you never saw it—worse, never had the faintest suspicion of it; that it was thrust at you twenty times a day—nearly got your stupid head smashed on account of it; yet you bleated away like the innocent little lamb that you are, and never even suspected! Dick, you’re a three-sheet-poster fool in colored ink. And to think that both of them know all about the first proposal! Both of them! Well, thank Heaven, Toronto is a long way from New York.”

THE END