Her Faithful Knight — page 316: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

312 Tracked Down. in his over-excited brain. Never in his twenty-eight years . of plodding, hard-working existence had such a tempest of feeling been stirred within this big, quiet-looking young man, with the herculean frame, steady, brown eyes, and drooping, yellow mustache. .He had been waiting for his ideal, garnering up for her his stores of emotion; now that he had found her and had earned her love, he felt - that he could sooner part with life itself than with Doro- thy. | Every moment of Aylmer’s time that was not spent at his office he devoted to Dorothy’s service. At ten o’clock on the morning after the conversation at the summer- house he presented himself at the door of the coroner’s court for Hammersmith district, an office held in a barn- like room at the rear of an old-fashioned inn close to the Suspension Bridge. The apartment was far from spa- cious; it was constructed of polished pine beams and lighted by four windows at the sides, by others in the slop- ing roof, and by gas-burners under green billiard-shades. On the murky walls hung bills announcing a benefit concert to be shortly given in the same room, and some garishly colored advertisements of a new “blanc-mange jelly.” It was a bright, windy, spring morning, and in the little, old-fashioned tea-garden outside daffodils and hyacinths were forcing their green points upward from the newly trimmed flower beds. A crowd of people had collected in the vicinity of the inn, and the bars were filled by groups of men and women, all interested in the “Ham- mersmith Mystery.” A hansom cab drew up, and the gates leading to the tea- gardens and stables, which had been kept closely fastened, were opened to admit two well-dressed men; at sight of one of them a storm of hissing went up from the loiterers outside. Darcy Derrick gave a sickly smile. He was not a (C@) EOmIGdoOo S