“How?”
“Oh, I can’t tell you. I said I never would—so I mustn’t. I should love
to—though I never shall.”
“Was it—interesting?”
“Thrilling! But there! I’m not going to tell you. I shouldn’t have
mentioned it if what you say hadn’t been so oddly like—”
But Coningsby came back into the room to ask if Miss Barry wouldn’t join
his wife in the nursery to see little Rufus while he was awake. In the
mean time he and I would retire to his own snuggery and talk business.
While I followed his account of the hotel he was building sufficiently to
get his ideas and to know what he expected of me, I was saying to myself:
“She doesn’t know me. She doesn’t know me at all. It never occurs to her
as a possibility that the man who wrote those words is the one she is now
asked to meet at dinner. How am I ever to get the nerve to let her know?”
When I found the opportunity I put the question, “Have your wife and Miss
Barry any idea about me?”
“About you? You mean about—”
“The Down and Out.”
“Lord, no! What would be the good of that?”
“The only good would be that—that I shouldn’t be sailing under false
colors.”
“False colors be hanged! We’ve all got a right to the privacy of our
private lives. You don’t go nosing into any one else’s soul; why should
any one else go nosing into yours? Why, if I were to tell my wife all I
could tell her about myself I should be ashamed to come home.”
I knew this argument, and yet when I came to apply it to my attitude
toward Regina Barry I was not satisfied.
_CHAPTER XI_
A few days later I was surprised to receive a note from Annette van
Elstine. It ran:
DEAR FRANK,—I have just heard that you are in New York—that you
have been here some time. Why did you never come to see me? It
was not kind. And didn’t you know that your mother has been
heartbroken over your disappearance? Jerry and Jack knew you
were somewhere in this country, but they’ve kept your mother in
the dark. What does it all mean? Come to tea with me—just me—on
Friday afternoon at five, and tell me all about it.