I Forbid the Banns! — page 78: what you’re looking at

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

68 | “T FORBID THE BANNS!”" “Oh, you do not suggest that that was the same thing ?” “The same thing? I said she found a man—oh, of course, I see what you mean now. It was Mr. Charlton whom she met. He overtook me where I was resting, and I begged him to tell Bertha that I would return to the hotel when I recovered sufficient breath to godown, He went up that ladder like a—no, monkey isn’t the word—he went up, at any rate, as if he had spent some years of his life doing nothing but going up ladders. He was very civil, and when he heard that we were going to England by this steamer he insisted on bringing us aboard. Now I wonder if I dare take any of that marmalade. Is there much sugar in marmalade—much flesh-forming elements? I am ona végime, and the result is that I daren’t touch anything without full inquiries as to its properties. I want something that isn’t flesh-forming.” } Miss Travers said she was sure that marmalade was quite harmless, and then she sat silent, lost in thought. She had now learnt all that there was to learn regarding the matter that had been a mystery to her. Mr. Charlton and that girl, whose name she had just heard was Bertha Lancaster, had met at the summit of Ladder Hill. She had gone up the face of that cliff with a curious feeling that at the summit she should discover the greatest felicity that the soul of man can conceive of. He had gone up with his heart full of that scene which had taken place at the summit of the cliff thirty-one years before—a scene to which he might even say he owed his very existence. Under such circumstances how could it be expected that they should refrain from fancying that their strange meeting was the result of the operations of a benevolent Providence to bring them together ? Marian Travers now knew the reason for the change which, in her sympathetic frame of mind, she had noticed in Julian Charlton. She had fancied that this change Gomichbookssco