Part 64

"This--this is infamous!" gasped Mr. Carr. "This is--is outrageous! I'm forty-five! I'm a widower! I detest a jaunty widower! I don't want to be one; I don't want to----"

Yates gazed at him with deep concern.

"Can't you help lifting your legs that way when you walk--as though a band were playing? Wait, I'll straighten your hat. Now try it again."

Mr. Carr pranced back across the room.

"I know I'm doing it again," he groaned, "but I can't help it! I--I feel so gay--dammit!--so frivolous--it's--it's that infernal machine. W-what am I to do, Yates," he added piteously, "when the world looks so good to me?"

"Think of your family!" urged Yates. "Think of--of Drusilla."

"Do you know," observed Carr, twirling his eyeglass and twisting his mustache, "that I'm beginning not to care what my family think!... Isn't it amazing, Yates? I--I seem to be somebody else, several years younger. Somewhere," he added, with a flourish of his monocle--"somewhere on earth there is a little birdie waiting for me."

"Don't talk that way!" exclaimed Yates, horrified.

"Yes, I will, young man. I repeat, with optimism and emphasis, that somewhere there is a birdie----"

"Mr. Carr!"

"Yes, merry old Top!"

"May I use your telephone?"

"I don't care what you do!" said Carr, gayly. "Use my telephone if you like; pull it out by the roots and throw it over Cooper's Bluff, for all I care! But"--and a sudden glimmer of reason seemed to come over him--"if you have one grain of human decency left in you, you won't drag me and my terrible plight into that scurrilous New York paper of yours."

"No," said Yates, "I won't. And that ends my career on Park Row. I'm going to telephone my resignation."

Mr. Carr gazed calmly around and twisted his mustache with a satisfied and retrospective smile.

"That's very decent of you, Yates; you must pardon me; I was naturally half scared to death at first; but I realize you are acting very handsomely in this horrible dilemma----"

"Naturally," interrupted Yates. "I must stand by the family into which I am, as you know, destined to marry."

"To be sure," nodded Carr, absently; "it really looks that way, doesn't it! And, Yates, you have no idea how I hated you an hour ago."

"Yes, I have," said Yates.

"No, you really have not, if you will permit me to contradict you, merry old Top. I--but never mind now. You have behaved in an unusually considerate manner. Who the devil are you, anyway?"

Yates informed him modestly.

"Well, why didn't you say so, instead of letting me bully you! I've known your father for twenty years. Why didn't you tell me you wanted to marry Drusilla, instead of coming and blushing all over the premises? I'd have told you she was too young; and she is! I'd have told you to wait; and you'd have waited. You'd have been civil enough to wait when I explained to you that I've already lost, by marriage, two daughters through that accursed machine. You wouldn't entirely denude me of daughters, would you?"

"I only want one," said John Yates, simply.

"Well, all right; I'm a decent father-in-law when I've got to be. I'm really a good sport. You may ask all my sons-in-law; they'll admit it." He scrutinized the young man and found him decidedly agreeable to look at, and at the same time a vague realization of his own predicament returned for a moment.

"Yates," he said unsteadily, "all I ask of you is to keep this terrible n-news from my innocent d-daughters until I can f-find out what sort of a person is f-fated to lead me to the altar!"

Yates took the offered hand with genuine emotion.

"Surely," he said, "your unknown intended must be some charming leader in the social activities of the great metropolis."

"Who knows! She may be m-my own l-laundress for all I know. She may be anything, Yates! She--she might even be b-black!"