"Of course I started up at once, donned hat and greatcoat, and followed
my respectable young person into a cab waiting at the door. Hardly was I
in when I was seized by some invisible personage, bound, blindfolded,
and gagged, and driven through the starry spheres, for all I know, for
hours and hours interminable.
"Presently we stopped. I was led out--led into a house, upstairs, my
uncomfortable bandages removed, and the use of my eyesight restored.
"I was in a large room, furnished very much like anybody's parlor, and
brilliantly lighted. My companion of the carriage was still at my elbow.
I turned to regard him. My friends, he was masked like a Venetian bravo,
and wore a romantic inky cloak, like a Roman toga, that swept the floor.
"I sat aghast, the cold perspiration oozing from every pore. I make
light of it now, but I could see nothing to laugh at then. Was I going
to be robbed and murdered? Why had I been decoyed here?
"My friend of the mask did not leave me long in suspense. Not death and
its horrors was to be enacted, but marriage--marriage, my friends--and I
was to perform the ceremony.
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