"That's just it. I have no desire to be the talk of the town. But there is no help for it now."
So the two, with Lily Holliday, summoned from next door, set to work upon the notes, while the trunk packing was done by Helen's aunt, who was weeping all the time, till Mary Malony, the maid, who was helping her, exclaimed:
"Sure mum, it's not packin' a thrunk, but a dampenin' down of clothes ye are, and they's no ironin' convayniences on the cars at all."
For a man on his wedding journey Braine seemed to have an extraordinary amount of business to attend to from the first hour of his arrival in New York. Sometimes it occupied his mornings, and sometimes his down town engagements stretched far into the afternoon, though he avoided that as much as possible, and managed almost always to have his evenings free.
In his hours of freedom he threw off care so completely that if Helen had been capable of doubting anything he said, she would not have believed in his business engagements at all.
He took her to the theatres, where light summer plays of no possible interest were running, and joined in the poor sport with the relish of a boy, and apparently without once thinking of the affairs with which he was toiling down town every day. He sought out all the places where summer music was to be heard. He went to the sea side, and would sit on the sands for hours with Helen, idly listening to the lazy swash of the surf as it surged in from the indolent summer sea. He watched even the merry-go-rounds with a contagious interest in the joy the children seemed to get out of them.
And yet all this time Braine was playing a great game, with success or failure for the stakes; a game mainly of skill, at which he was a novice, while his adversaries were veterans. If he succeeded, nothing was beyond his reach. If he failed--but he did not contemplate failure. It had never been his habit.
At first, Helen enjoyed the privacy of a stranger in the great town, going and coming at will, knowing nobody and expecting attention from nobody. But this was of brief duration, and signs that it was destined speedily to end appeared when men of wealth and social prominence began to show themselves at the hotel with Braine, and to seek presentation to herself in her private parlor.