That night came Aunt Ellen,gentle,sentimental,wrinkled,sighing,oppressed by wealth,in to Brother Anthony at his evening paper,and began discourse on the subject of lovers'woes.
‘He told me all about it,’said brother Anthony yawning.‘I told him my bank account was at his service.And then he began to knock money.Said money couldn't help.Said the rules of society couldn't be buckled for a yard by a team of ten-millionaires.’
‘Oh,Anthony,’sighed Aunt Ellen,‘I wish you would not think so much of money.Wealth is nothing where a true affection is concerned.Love is all-powerful.If he only had spoken earlier!She could not have refused our Richard.But now I fear it is too late.He will have no opportunity to address her.All your gold cannot bring happiness to your son.’
At eight o'clock the next evening Aunt Ellen took a quaint old gold ring from a moth-eaten case and gave it to Richard.
‘Wear it to-night,nephew,’she begged.‘Your mother gave it to me.Good luck in love,she said it brought.She asked me to give it to you when you had found the one you loved.’
Young Rockwall took the ring reverently and tried it on his smallest finger.It slipped as far as the second joint and stopped.He took it off and stuffed it into his vest pocket,after the manner of man.And then he 'phoned for his cab.
At the station he captured Miss Lantry out of the gadding mob at 8:32.
‘We mustn't keep mamma and the others waiting,’said she.
‘To Wallack's Theatre as fast as you can drivel’said Richard loyally.
They whirled up Forty-second to Broadway,and then down the white-starred lane that leads from the soft meadows of sunset to the rocky hills of morning.
At Thirty-fourth Street young Richard quickly thrust up the trap and ordered the cabman to stop.
‘I've dropped a ring,’he apologized,as he climbed out.‘It was my mother's,and I'd hate to lose it.I won't detain you a minute-I saw where it fell.’
In less than a minute he was back in the cab with the ring.
But within that minute a cross-town car had stopped directly in front of the cab.The cabman tried to pass to the left,but a heavy express wagon cut him off.He tried the right,and had to back away from a furniture van that had no business to be there.He tried to back out,but dropped his reins and swore dutifully.He was blockaded in a tangled mess of vehicles and horses.
One of those street blockades had occurred that sometimes tie up commerce and movement quite suddenly in the big city.
‘Why don't you drive on?’said Miss Lantry impatiently.‘We'll be late.’
Richard stood up in the cab and looked around.He saw a congested flood of wagons,trucks,cabs,vans and street-cars filling the vast space where Broadway,Sixth Avenue and Thirly-fourth Street cross one another as a twenty-six-inch maiden fills her twenty-two-inch girdle.And still from all the cross-streets they were hurrying and rattling toward the converging point at full speed,and hurling themselves into the struggling mass,locking wheels and adding their drivers imprecations to the clamour.The entire traffic of Manhattan seemed to have jammed itself around them.The oldest New Yorker among the thousands of spectators that lined the sidewalks had not witnessed a street blockade of the proportions of this one.