Part 56

“I hope you'll be all right now,” he said to the girl, haste in his tones. “I'm sorry--I must go--I have an important engagement.”

Her eyes met his in level gaze, turned scornful glance at the others in the room, and then came back to his.

“Are you going in the direction of the Boulevard?” she asked him.

“Straight there.”

“Will you bother with me as far as the Boulevard?”

“If you are a good walker,” he informed her. There was strict business in her tone and cool civility in his.

“I'm going along with this gentleman, mother.”

Farr ushered her ahead of him through the shattered door.

“But I want to walk home with you, my child,” wailed the sobbing woman.

“You'd better ask Mr. Dodd to escort you. And I trust that the talk you and he will have will bring both of you to your senses.”

She hurried away up the alley with Farr, after he had unlocked the front door, finding the key on the inside.

“I am sorry I must hurry you,” he apologized, “and if you cannot keep up I must desert you when we get to a well-lighted street.”

She drove a sharp side glance at him and did not reply. Probably for the first time in her life she heard a young man declare with determination that he was in a hurry to leave her. Even a sensible young woman who is pretty must feel some sort of momentary pique because a young man can have engagements so summary and so engrossing.

He offered her his arm that they might walk faster. Her touch thrilled him. He was far from feeling the outward calm that he displayed to her.

They did not speak as they hurried.

Both were nearly breathless when they came out on the Boulevard. He saw the big clock--its hands were nearly at the right angle.

“Good night!” she gasped, and she put out her hand to him. “I thank you!”

“It was nothing,” he assured her.

When their palms met they looked into each other's eyes. It was a momentary flash which they exchanged, but in that instant both of them were thrilled with the strange, sweet knowledge that no human soul may analyze: it is the mystic conviction which makes this man or that woman different from all the rest of humankind to the one whose heart is touched.

She gave him a smile. “Are you a knight-errant?”

She hurried away before he could reply--and, though all his yearning nature strove against his man's resolution to do his duty, it could not prevail: he did not follow her as he wanted to--running after her, crying his love. But duty won out by a mere hazard of a margin because her face, as she had shown it to him at the moment of parting, possessed not merely the wonderful beauty which had so impressed him when he had first seen her--it shone with a sudden flash of emotion that glorified it.

He turned away and hurried to the foot of the steps of the Mellicite Club.

He had no time to ponder on the nature of that mystery which he had uncovered in the shabby cottage in Rose Alley nor to wonder what sort of persecution it was that could enlist a mother's aid in that grotesque fashion against her own daughter.

He had not time even to frame a plan of campaign against the man whom the patient waiters in Union Hall were expecting him to capture.

The bell in the tower was booming its nine strokes and the Honorable Archer Converse was coming down the steps from his club, erect, crisp, immaculate, dignified--tapping his cane against the stones.

XVIII

CORRALING A CONVERT

Mr. Converse bestowed only a careless glance at the stranger who was waiting at the foot of the club-house steps.