Time Tunnel Read Online Free PDF Page A

Valerie, to arrange for an especially designed object. The workmanship of your manufacturer is superb. Can it be arranged to have something especially made for me?”
    “My aunt will tell you,” said Valerie politely. But her eyes went back to Harrison. “My uncle attends to buying the stock for the shop, M’sieur Ybarra, but my aunt really directs the business. You will have to consult her.”
    Her manner was strictly commercial, except when she looked at Harrison. Then she seemed glad to be alive. He knew the exquisite anguish of a young man who wants to be all-important to a girl, when he cannot believe that she is just as anxious to be all-important to him.
    “Then,” said Pepe, “I will look around the shop, if I may. These are very skillful reproductions.”
    “But they aren’t reproductions,” said Valerie. “They are all originals. No two are exactly alike. They are all made by hand by, as you said, very skilled craftsmen.”
    “But where?” demanded Pepe. “Where are they made?”
    Valerie shrugged.
    “My uncle, M. Dubois, keeps that information to himself. He goes away, and he comes back with the articles the shop deals in. I do not know where he goes. My aunt has never mentioned it. It was M. Carroll who determined that the business should call itself a business of import and export with the year 1804. My aunt conceded that it gave the shop individuality.”
    Pepe said, “Hm.” He began to prowl about. He examined a shelf of brocades and fingered them with a knowledgeable air. Presently he was looking at the books Harrison had mentioned. There were not more than a dozen of them. He fingered the fly-leaves and muttered to himself. He looked at the guns. He tested the balance of a sporting weapon. It was a flint-lock, but it balanced as perfectly as the most modern of sporting rifles. Presently he was reading a Moniteur . The paper was fresh, like the paper of the books. He became absorbed.
    Harrison found his tongue. It is, of course, characteristic of all people in highly emotional states that they want to talk about themselves. Harrison and Valerie had material for just such talk. They had shared memories of a reasonably happy childhood, but they did not confine themselves to that topic. Harrison listened while Valerie explained that the death of her parents had sent her to boarding-school, and when that was ended there was only her aunt left to supervise her. Her aunt was then furiously occupied in directing the affairs of her brother, M. Dubois, but very suddenly there was a romance. Her aunt married, and there was a ménage à quatre , with Madame Carroll firmly directing the affairs of her husband and her brother as well as Valerie. And things did not go too well. But then, abruptly, the import-export business with the year 1804 began. The shop was opened and was immediately prosperous, but Madame Carroll ruled sternly that there must be the strictest of economy until it was thoroughly established and of course Valerie must help.
    “ M’mselle ,” said Pepe in a curiously muffled voice, “I take it that this issue of the Moniteur —”
    “But of course, M’sieur Ybarra,” said Valerie. “All of them are for sale. At one hundred francs the copy. You will find there the months of March and April, 1804.”
    “This one I buy!” said Pepe. “Of April second.”
    “They run, I think,” said Valerie helpfully, “to the twenty-fifth. But when my uncle returns there will be later ones.”
    Pepe made an inarticulate sound.
    “My great-great-grandfather Ybarra,” he said after a moment, “visited Paris during Napoleon’s time. He fought a duel with the Compte de Froude, and had his ear sliced. The account of the affair is here! I did not know the details, before.”
    “Indeed?” said Valerie politely. “That is doubtless interesting!”
    She turned back to Harrison. She asked questions about what he had done with himself and what had happened to him in the past dozen years. He told