THE GREAT CONDITION
I
'Ah there, confound it!' said Bertram Braddle when he had once more frowned, so far as he could frown, over his telegram. 'I must catch the train if I'm to have my morning clear in town. And it's a most abominable nuisance!'
'Do you mean on account of—a—her?' asked, after a minute's silent sympathy, the friend to whom—in the hall of the hotel, still bestrewn with the appurtenances of the newly disembarked—he had thus querulously addressed himself.
He looked hard for an instant at Henry Chilver, but the hardness was not all produced by Chilver's question. His annoyance at not being able to spend his night at Liverpool was visibly the greatest that such a privation can be conceived as producing, and might have seemed indeed to transcend the limits of its occasion. 'I promised her the second day out that, no matter at what hour we should get in, I would see her up to London and save her having to take a step by herself.'
'And you piled up the assurance'—Chilver somewhat irrelevantly laughed—'with each successive day!'
'Naturally—for what is there to do between New York and Queenstown but pile up? And now, with this pistol at my head'—crumpling the telegram with an angry fist, he tossed it into the wide public chimney-place—'I leave her to scramble through to-morrow as she can. She has to go on to Brighton and she doesn't know———' And Braddle's quickened sense of the perversity of things dropped to a moment's helpless communion with the aggravating face of his watch.
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