"Miss Dean? Oh, beg pardon! I was thinking of Madame Duprat. Ah ... Miss
Dean ... now ... I infer you have urgent business with her--what?"
"Yes, very!" the girl insisted eagerly. "If I could only see her ... I
must see her!"
"I'm sure she's in, then!" the man declared in accents of profound
conviction. "Possibly asleep. But at home. O positively!" He inserted a
key in the lock and pushed the door open. "If you don't mind coming
in--out of the weather--I'll see."
Joan eyed him doubtfully. The light was indifferent, a mere glimmer from
the corner lamp at Eighth Avenue; but it enabled her to see that he was
passably tall and quite slender. He wore a Panama hat with dark
clothing. His attitude was more explicitly impersonal than that of any
man with whom she had as yet come into contact: she could detect in it
no least trace either of condescension or of an ingratiating spirit. He
seemed at once quite self-possessed and indefinitely preoccupied,
disinterested, and quite agreeable to be made use of. In short, he
engaged her tremendously.
But what more specifically prepossessed her in his favour, and what in
the end influenced her to repose some slight confidence in the man, was
a quality with which the girl herself endowed him: she chose to be
reminded in some intangible, elusive fashion, of that flower of
latter-day chivalry who had once whisked her out of persecution into
his taxicab and to her home. In point of fact, the two were vastly
different, and Joan knew it; but, at least, she argued, they were alike
in this: both were _gentlemen_--rare visitants in her cosmos.
It was mostly through fatigue and helpless bewilderment, however, that
she at length yielded and consented to precede him into the vestibule.
Here he opened the inner doors, ushering Joan into a hallway typical of
an old order of dwelling, now happily obsolescent. The floor was of
tiles, alternately black and white: a hideous checker-board arrangement.
A huge hat-rack, black walnut framing a morbid mirror, towered on the
one hand; on the other rose a high arched doorway, closed. And there was
a vast and gloomy stairway with an upper landing lost in shadows
impenetrable to the feeble illumination of the single small tongue of
gas flickering in an old-fashioned bronze chandelier.
Listening, Joan failed to detect in all the house any sounds other than
those made by the young man and herself.
"If you'll be good enough to follow me--"
He led the way to the rear of the hall, where, in the shadow of the
staircase, he unlocked a door and disappeared. The girl waited on the
threshold of a cool and airy chamber, apparently occupying the entire
rear half of the ground floor. At the back, long windows stood open to
the night. The smell of rain was in the room.
"Half a minute: I'll make a light."
He moved through the darkness with the assurance of one on old, familiar
ground. In the middle of the room a match spluttered and blazed: with a
slight _plup!_ a gas drop-light with a green shade leapt magically out
of the obscurity, discovering the silhouette of a tall, spare figure
bending low to adjust the flame; which presently grew strong and even,
diffusing a warm and steady glow below the green penumbra of its shade.
The man turned back with his quaint air of deference. "Now, if you
don't mind sitting down and waiting a minute, I'll ask Madame Duprat
about Miss--ah--your friend--"
"Miss Dean--Maizie Dean."
"Thank you."
With this he left the girl, and presently she heard his footsteps on the
staircase.
She found a deeply cushioned arm-chair, and subsided into it with a
sigh. The intensity of her weariness was indeed a very serious matter
with her. Her very wits shirked the labour of grappling with the problem
of what she should do if Maizie Dean were not at home....
Wondering incoherently, she stared about her. The rich, subdued glow of
the shaded lamp suggested more than it revealed, but she was impressed
by the generous proportions of the room. The drop-light itself stood
on a long, broad table littered with a few books and a great many
papers, inkstands, pens, blotters, ash-trays, pipes: all in agreeable
disorder. Beyond this table was one smaller, which supported a
type-writing-machine. Against the nearer wall stood a luxurious, if
worn, leather-covered couch. There were two immense black walnut
bookcases. The windows at the back disclosed a section of iron-railed
balcony.
Joan grew sensitive to an anodynous atmosphere of quiet and comfort....
Drowsily she heard a quiet knocking at some door upstairs; then a
subdued murmur of voices, the closing of a door, footsteps returning
down the long staircase. When these last sounded on the tiled flooring,
the girl spurred her flagging senses and got up in a sudden flutter of
doubt, anxiety, and embarrassment. The man entering the room found her
so--poised in indecision.
"Please do sit down," he said quietly, with a smile that carried
reassurance; and, taking her compliance for something granted, passed on
to another arm-chair near the long table.
With a docility and total absence of distrust that later surprised her
to remember, Joan sank back, eyes eloquent with the question unuttered
by her parted lips.
Her host, lounging, turned to her a face of which one half was in dense
shadow: a keen, strongly modelled face with deep-set eyes at once
whimsical and thoughtful, and a mouth thin-lipped but generously wide.
He rested an elbow on the table and his head on a spare, sinewy hand,
thrusting slender fingers up into hair straight, not long, and rather
light in colour.
"I'm sorry to have to report," he said gently, "that 'The Dancing Deans,
Maizie and May,' are on the road. So I'm informed by Madame Duprat, at
least. They're not expected back for several weeks.... I hope you aren't
greatly disappointed."
Her eyes, wide and dark with dismay, told him too plainly that she was.
She made no effort to speak, but after an instant of dumb consternation,
moved as if to rise.
He detained her with a gesture. "Please don't hurry: you needn't, you
know. Of course, if you must, I won't detain you: the door is open, your
way clear to the street. But what are you going to do about a place to
sleep tonight?"
She stared in surprise and puzzled resentment. A warm wave of colour
temporarily displaced her pallor.
"What makes you so sure I've got no place to sleep?" she asked
ungraciously.
He lifted his shoulders slightly and dropped his hand to the table.
"Perhaps I was impertinent," he admitted. "I'm sorry.... But you
haven't--have you?"
"No, I haven't," she said sharply. "But what's that--"
"As you quite reasonably imply, it's nothing to me," he interrupted
suavely. "But I'd be sorry to think of you out there--alone--in the
rain--when there's no reason why you need be."
"No reason!" she echoed, wondering if she had misjudged him after all.
Without warning the man tilted the green lamp-shade until a broad,
strong glow flooded her face. A spark of indignation kindled in the girl
while she endured his brief, impersonal, silent examination. Sheer
fatigue alone prevented her from rising and walking out of the
room--that, and curiosity.
He replaced the shade, and got out of the chair with a swift movement
that seemed not at all one of haste.
"I see no reason," he announced coolly. "I've got to run along now--I
merely dropped in to get a manuscript. I think you'll be quite
comfortable here--and there's a good bolt on the door. Of course, it's
very unconventional, but I hope you'll be kind enough to overlook that,
considering the circumstances. And tomorrow, after a good rest, you can
make up your mind whether it would be wiser to stick to your first plan
or--go home."
He smiled with a vague, disinterested geniality, and added a pleading
"Now don't say no!" when he saw that the girl had likewise risen.
"How do you know I've left home?" she demanded hotly.
"Well"--his smile broadened--"deductive faculty--Sherlock
Holmes--Dupin--that sort of tommyrot, you know. But it wasn't such a bad
guess--now was it?"
"I don't see how you knew," she muttered sulkily.
He ran his long fingers once or twice through his hair in a manner of
great perplexity.
"I can't quite tell, myself."
"It wasn't my fault," she protested with a flash of passion. "I lost my
job today, and because I said I wanted to go on the stage, my father put
me out of the house."
"Yes," he agreed amiably; "they always do--don't they? I fancied it was
something like that. But there isn't really any reason why you
shouldn't go home tomorrow and patch it up--or is there?"