ingly of middle age, with a very handsome and friendly face.
His eyes were dark grey, and there was a very tender light in
them as he turned to his fair fellow-traveler.
" Our honeymoon has begun, Elda," he said. " Tell me again
that you are not sorry to have left home, friends, country, all
for me."
" I do," she said, softly. "Oh Leopold, had Itodo it all again,
it would not cause me a single pang of regret. lam with you
and I am content."
" And so am I," he said. " I would be a churl, indeed, if I
were not, after such assurance."
" How happy.we will be, Leo," she murmured, after an interval
of blissful silence, during which her eyes lingered lovingly on his
face.
" How happy, indeed " he began. But a prolonged,
wailing shriek from the whistle—a shrill, agonized, half-human
cry, it seemed—drowned his words. And ere the echoes had died
away in the clear, cold night, they heard the noise of grinding
brakes, the sibilant hiss of escaping steam, mingled with cries of
distress—a frightful babel of horrible sounds. Then, while Elda
clung to her husband in a paroxysm of fear, there came a sudden
forward lurch of the car, a swift plunge downward into abysmal
darkness, a terrible crash and then oblivion, deep and lasting as
death itself.
An hour later, while the work of rescue progressed, a man,
wild and disheveled, ran frantically up and down the banks of the
narrow, rapid stream, calling in a voice which sounded loud above
the rush of the waters and the crying of the wounded, " Eldal
Flda I come back to me!" But no answering voice was heard.
For even at that moment, far down the little stream, washed
ashore on a sandy bar, the body of his newly-wedded wife lay,
pale and still, looking ghostly and ghastly in the light of the
waning moon.
It was a bitterly cold night, even for St. Petersburg. Keen
winds, driving through rapidly falling snow, hurled the sharp par
ticles with stinging force into the faces of the passers-by. Down
near the wharves, where the damp fog hung like a pall, they
shrieked through the rigging of the achored vessels with a voice
like the wailing of lost souls. To an imaginative mind, it was
The Free Lance
[ PEBRUARY,