He read it, and blushed to the roots of his ears.
"This is no time to desert the flag, Harley," said I, as he read.
"Stick to your colors, and let her stick to hers. You'd better be
careful how you force your heroine."
"Ha, ha!" he laughed. "I should think so, and for more reasons than
one. I never really intended to do horrible things with her, my boy.
Trust me, if I do lead her, to lead her gently. My persuasion will
be suggestive rather than mandatory."
"And that hero--from the Brooklyn dry-goods shop?" I asked, with a
smile.
"I'd like to see him so much as--tell her the price of anything,"
cried Harley. "A man like that has no business to live in the same
hemisphere with a woman like Marguerite Andrews. When I threatened
her with him I was conversing through a large and elegant though
wholly invisible hat."
I breathed more freely. She was still sacred and safe in his hands.
Shortly after, dinner over, we left the table, and went to the
theatre, where we saw what the programme called the "latest London
realistic success," in which three of the four acts of an intensely
exciting melodrama depended upon a woman's not seeing a large navy
revolver, which lay on the table directly before her eyes in the
first.
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