ew stylographic pens. "I've even got an
envelope--you see how everything's predestined! There--steady the
thing on your knee, and I'll get the pen going in a second. They have
to be humoured; wait--" He banged the hand that held the pen against
the back of the bench. "It's like jerking down the mercury in a
thermometer: just a trick. Now try--"

She laughed, and bending over the sheet of paper which he had laid on
his note-case, began to write. Archer walked away a few steps, staring
with radiant unseeing eyes at the passersby, who, in their turn, paused
to stare at the unwonted sight of a fashionably-dressed lady writing a
note on her knee on a bench in the Common.

Madame Olenska slipped the sheet into the envelope, wrote a name on it,
and put it into her pocket. Then she too stood up.

They walked back toward Beacon Street, and near the club Archer caught
sight of the plush-lined "herdic" which had carried his note to the
Parker House, and whose driver was reposing from this effort by bathing
his brow at the corner hydrant.

"I told you everything was predestined! Here's a cab for us. You
see!" They laughed, astonished at the miracle of picking up a public
conveyance at that hour, and in that unlikely spot, in a city where
cab-stands were still a "foreign" novelty.

Archer, looking at his watch, saw that there was time to drive to the
Parker House before going to the steamboat landing. They rattled
through the hot streets and drew up at the door of the hotel.

Archer held out his hand for the letter. "Shall I take it in?" he
asked; but Madame Olenska, shaking her head, sprang out and disappeared
through the glazed doors. It was barely half-past ten; but what if the
emissary, impatient for her reply, and not knowing how else to employ
his time, were already seated among the travellers with cooling drinks
at their elbows of whom Archer had caught a glimpse as she went in?

He waited, pacing up and down before the herdic. A Sicilian youth with
eyes like Nastasia's offered to shine his boots, and an Irish matron to
sell him peaches; and every few moments the doors opened to let out hot
men with straw hats tilted far back, who glanced at him as they went
by. He marvelled that the door should open so often, and that all the
people it let out should look so like each other, and so like all the
other hot men who, at that hour, through the length and breadth of the
land, were passing continuously in and