Lennox was a broker, a vocation which he practised in Wall Street. Early
on the following afternoon, while returning from there, he sat wedged
between a gunman and a Hun. He was unconscious of either. The uncertain
market; the slump, momentarily undiscernible, but mathematically
inevitable; customers, credulous or sceptical, but always avid; the
pulse of the feverish street which the ticker indifferently registered;
the atmosphere of tobacco and greed; the trailing announcements; "Steel,
three-fourths; Pennsy, a half," these things were forgotten. The train
crashed on. Of that too he was unconscious.
Before him a panorama had unrolled--the day he first saw her, the hour
he first loved her, the moment he first thought she might care for
him--the usual panorama that unfolds before any one fortunate enough to
love and to be loved in return.
"Grand Central!"
The gunman disappeared, the Hun had gone, the car emptied itself on a
platform from which it was at once refilled. Lennox ascended the stair,
reached the street, boarded a taxi, drove to his home.
The latter, situated on the ground floor of an apartment house a step
from Park Avenue, was entirely commonplace, fitted with furniture large
and ugly, yet minutely relieved by a photograph which showed the almost
perfect oval of Margaret's almost perfect face.
The photograph stood on a table in the sitting-room beyond which
extended other rooms that, in addition to being ugly, were dark. But
Lennox had no degrading manias for comfort. Pending the great day he
camped in these rooms, above which, on an upper storey was a duplex
apartment which, if Margaret liked, he proposed to take.
It was for her opinion regarding it that he had asked her to come. In
the forenoon she had telephoned that she and her mother would both be
with him. He had instructed his servant accordingly and now a silver
tea-service that had belonged to his grandmother and which, being
Victorian, was hideous, gleamed at him as he entered the rooms.
Something else gleamed also. On a rug, a puddle of sunlight had spilled.
Above, on the embossed platter, were petits fours, watercress
sandwiches, a sack of sweetmeats, a bunch of violets, a scatter of cups.
Beneath was the puddle.
Lennox looked. It seemed all right.
Harris, his servant, a little man, thin as an umbrella, sidled silently
by. The vestibule took him. From it came the sound of a voice, limpid,
clear, which Lennox knew and knew too was not Margaret's.
"A lady to see you, sir," Harris, reappearing and effacing himself,
announced.
The doorway framed her. There, with her shock of auburn hair, her cameo
face, her slim figure and her costume which, though simple, was not the
ruinous simplicity that Fifth Avenue achieves, Cassy presented a picture
very different from that on the table, a picture otherwise
differentiated by a bundle that was big as a baby.
Lennox did not know but that it might contain a baby and the possibility
alarmed this man who was afraid of nobody.
"Hello!" he exclaimed.
In exclaiming, he stared. He liked the girl. But at the moment she was
in the way. Moreover, why she had come to these rooms of his, where she
had not been invited, and where she had not ventured before, was a
mystery.
"How's your father?" he added.
There are people, as there are animals, that cannot be awkward and are
never ridiculous. Cassy was one of them. None the less she stood on one
foot. The tea-table had become very talkative. It told her that it was
expecting somebody; that watercress sandwiches were not for her; no, nor
Victorian horrors either.
"Be off!" it shouted.
"Sit down," said Lennox.
Cassy, hugging the bundle, remained in the doorway. It was not the
tea-table merely, but something else, the indefinable something which
one may feel and not describe that was telling her to hurry. Afterward,
with that regret which multiplies tears and subtracts nothing, she
wished she had hurried, wished rather that she had not come, wished that
she had defied the wolf, outfaced the butcher, done anything except
enter these rooms.
She shifted the bundle. "I have been gadding about in Wall Street. I
never was there before, but it is so nice and windy I may go there
again. This is just a good-day and good-bye."
As she spoke she turned, and as she turned Lennox' heart smote him. He
hurried to her.
"See here! You can't go like this. Have a cup of tea."
Cassy gave him the rare seduction of her smile. "Thank you. I am out on
business and I never drink in business hours."
But now Lennox had got himself between her and the vestibule.
"Business!" he repeated. "What is it? Anything in my line? Let's
transact it here. Wall Street is no place"--for a pretty girl he was
about to say but, desisting, he substituted--"for you."
"But you are expecting people."
"How in the world did you know? Anyway, they are not here yet and if
they were they would be glad to meet you."
"I wonder!" said Cassy, whose wonder concerned not their pleasure but
her own, and concerned it because she hated snobs, among whom she knew
that Lennox moved.
"Now, tell me," he resumed.
Cassy, realising that it must be then or never, looked up at him.
"You remember father's violin?"
"I should say I did."
"Well, my business in Wall Street was to offer it as--what do you call
it?--as collateral."