The Port of Adventure. C. N. Williamson
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or revolver sticking out. His blue serge suit was of a country cut, the trousers rather short and tight for the long, straight legs; and the shoes were wide in the toe, thick in the sole.
All these details Angela noted in one quick glance; and admiring the tall brown eccentricity as she might have admired a fine bronze statue out of place, in the wrong surroundings, she wondered from what sort of niche the statue had transplanted itself. In her mind there was no room whatever for the little man with the pointed moustache, so she forgot his existence.
"Mighty pleased to—do any service for you, lady," stammered the bronze statue, and though his voice was pleasant, it had not the cultured accent to which Angela was accustomed. Besides, it was quaint to be addressed as "lady." London cabbies and beggars called one "lidy"; but they were a law unto themselves. Still it sounded rather nice as he said it: "pleased to do any service for you, lady."
She nodded politely as she moved away, following the bellboy who had the key of her rooms, and as she reached the lift, something made her glance back. The sombrero was on the dark head again, and the head was bent over the hotel register, where Mrs. May had written her name. The man was either looking at that or writing his own. Angela inclined to the latter supposition. Probably this wild creature of forests had just arrived in New York from somewhere very far away, perhaps from her father's Golden West, the country of the sun. As the lift flashed her with horrifying swiftness up to the twelfth floor, she still seemed to hear the echo of the pleasant voice, saying "Pleased to do any service for you, lady." A few minutes later, however, she forgot the incident of the dropped bag in admiring her pretty suite of white and green rooms, the bath, and the cedar-lined wardrobes in the wall, which she remembered as typically American. She felt like a child examining a new playhouse. Suddenly she was sure that she would get on well with Americans, that she would like them, and they her, though until to-day she had been afraid that her country-people, in their own land, would seem to her like strangers. Although she had not made up her mind how long she would stay in New York before going West, she unpacked a great many things without stopping to think that perhaps she was giving herself useless trouble. Then, when she had scattered quantities of dresses, petticoats, hats, and cloaks in both rooms, she paused bewildered. Everything she had taken out on shipboard looked wrinkled and rather haggard. She wished, after all, that she had brought Josephine, though she had not been fond of her, or of the others. She did not know what to do with the things, and never could she get them all back again when it should be time to leave the hotel! It was as Josephine had prophesied. How the Frenchwoman would enjoy saying, "It is as I warned Madame la Princesse!"
"Perhaps a servant of the hotel would help me," she thought; and a call through the telephone brought to the door a tall, dark, Irish girl, who would have been pretty if her eyes and cheeks had not been stained with crying. At first glance Angela was interested, for she was beginning to be happy, and could not bear to think that any one who came near her was miserable. At all times, too, she had quick sympathies, and could read the secrets of sad or happy eyes in a flash, as she passed them in the street, though less sensitive persons saw nothing noteworthy; and often she longed to hurry back to some stranger, as if a voice had cried after her which she could not let cry in vain. Now, as she talked to the maid about the unpacking, unspoken sympathy went out from her in a magnetic current which the Irish girl felt. Her tear-blurred blue eyes fixed themselves on the young lady in black, and she had a strong, exciting impression that some blessing hovered near her, which she could take hold of if only she had courage.
"Indeed, miss, I'll love to help you," she said. "'Twill be a rale pleasure—and not many comes my way, these days."
"I'm sorry for that," Angela told her. "Perhaps you're homesick. I think you must have come not long ago from a green island which every one loves."
"You're right, miss." The Irish eyes brimmed over. "And I'm homesick enough to die, but not so much fur Oireland, as fur a place I niver set eyes on."
Angela was interested. "You're homesick for a place you never set eyes on? Then some one you love must be there."
This time the tears could not be kept back. The young woman had begun her work of gathering up Angela's belongings, and lest the tears should fall on a lace nightgown she was folding, she laid it on a chair, to search wildly for her handkerchief. "Do excuse me, if ye can, miss," she choked. "I've no right to make a fool o' meself in front of you, but you're that kind, I got filled up like. It's the State of Oregon I'm thinkin' of, for the man I crossed the say to marry is there, and now I don't know when we shall ever see one another."
"Oregon's a long way off," said Angela. "I know that, though I've lived in Europe most of my life. Only the other day I looked at it on the map."
"Have ye got that map by you, miss?"
"Yes. We'll find it presently, in this mass of books in my cabin trunk. But I was going to say, though Oregon's ever so far West, the man you came from Ireland to marry will surely send for you. Then how happy you'll be, by and by."
"A long by and by, I'm afraid, miss."
"Oh, why? Isn't there money enough?" Angela began to plan how she might make the course of true love run smooth; though in these days she was not as rich as she had been.
"There was, to begin with," the girl answered. "You see, miss, he sent for me to meet him in New York, and 'twas he paid me way over. He'd bought land in Oregon, and irritated it, as they calls it—and was doin' wonderful. The idea was he should meet me at the ship, and we'd get married and go West, man and wife. But his partner cheated him out of his eyes, and the trick only come out when I was on the water. So instead o' findin' me Tim I found a letter. The poor boy's had to start all over again; and I tuk service, waitin' till he can scrape up the money to fetch me out."
"I may be going quite near Oregon myself before long," said Angela impulsively. "Do you think you could learn to be my maid, and would you like to go with me?"
"Like it!" the girl echoed, turning white and then red. "'Twould be heaven. I'm not too happy here. The housekeeper's got a 'clow' on me. And indade, I've done a bit of maidin' to a lady in the ould country. I'd work early and late to please ye, miss!"
"I feel sure you would," Angela said. "But you know, if you're going to be my maid, you must give up calling me 'miss,' for I am—Mrs. May."
"I beg your pardon, I'm sure, ma'am. But 'twas because ye look so young, it never entered me head ye could be married, and perhaps even a widow."
Angela did not speak, and at once the girl made sure that she had hit upon the truth with her last words. The lovely lady was in black for her husband, to whom she must have been married when almost a child. "My name's Kate McGinnis, ma'am," she went quickly on, "and though I've got no recommendations in writin', because I thought to take a husband and not service, I can get a good word from the priest, and——"
"Your face tells me enough," Angela broke in. "I know you're a good girl, and that you'll be a comfort to me on the journey. But if you go, you mustn't expect to get out to Oregon immediately. I mean to travel to California, and I should like you to stay with me until I settle somewhere. Then I'll send you to the place where your fiancé lives."
"That's what I'd like best of anything," exclaimed Kate. "Tim ain't ready yet, but he will be soon—now the worry about payin' the big price of me railway ticket will be off our minds. Oh, but doesn't it seem too good to be true?"
"Why not say too good not to be true?" asked Angela, whose optimism to-day was ready to triumph over past stumbling-blocks. "It's settled, then—if the hotel will let you off."
"I've giv' in me notice, miss—madam, I mean," replied the girl hastily. "There's some things I don't think Tim would like about me bein' in a hotel, and I was lookin' out for a private place. Me time's up here day after to-morrow. But, oh, ma'am, there's a thing I haven't told ye—indade, 'twas because I forgot, not that I meant to desave. Maybe, when ye know what it is ye'll change yer mind about havin' me—and I couldn't blame ye."
Angela's clear eyes looked full into the clear eyes of the Irish girl. "I don't believe you can have anything to tell me which will make me want not to have