“C. Q.”; or, In the Wireless House
sengers as possible to see personally that he had been honored above all men. He stalked along with her, whispering intimately, and touching his cap in all directions. But there was nobody on deck who fitted the description and in the reading saloon were only the Boston bride and her husband, playing an exclusive game of piquet, three old women who were writing exhaustive narratives in their diaries of the astonishing things one saw on the Champs Elysées and in the Vatican, and an aged man in a gray shawl eating an orange, the odor of which permeated the air and suggested a dining-car on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad going through a tunnel.
“I don’t think he ’s the one!” giggled Lily; “that is, unless he ’s accused of the crime of eating oranges in the closed season."
“No,” answered Ponsonby. “There are no burglars or murderers concealed in here. Let ’s take a turn on the second-cabin deck.”
Now it was perhaps a rather peculiar thing that on the promenade deck in all the long line of extended masculine forms there was not one which fitted the very general description repeated by the Captain. There were flat-nosed158
