“I’m awfully glad, Myra; and I know you’ll be glad too.”
Myra skipped a little pool of water and, reaching her taxi, balanced on the running board like a ballet dancer.
“Bye, Lilah. See you soon.”
“Good-bye, Myra. Good luck!”
And knowing Myra as she did, Lilah felt that her last remark was distinctly superfluous.
II
That was essentially the reason that one Friday night six weeks later Knowleton Whitney paid a taxi bill of seven dollars and ten cents and with a mixture of emotions paused beside Myra on the Biltmore steps.
The outer surface of his mind was deliriously happy, but just below that was a slowly hardening fright at what he had done. He, protected since his freshman year at Harvard from the snares of fascinating fortune hunters, dragged away from several sweet young things by the acquiescent nape of his neck, had taken advantage of his family’s absence in the West to become so enmeshed in the toils that it was hard to say which was toils and which was he.
The afternoon had been like a dream: November twilight along Fifth Avenue after the matinée, and he and Myra looking out at the swarming crowds from the romantic privacy of a hansom cab—quaint device—then tea at the Ritz and her white hand gleaming on the arm of a chair beside him; and suddenly quick broken words. After that had come the trip to the jeweler’s and a mad dinner in some little Italian restaurant where he had written “Do you?” on the back of the bill of fare and pushed it over for her to add the ever-miraculous “You know I do!” And now at the day’s end they paused on the Biltmore steps.
“Say it,” breathed Myra close to his ear.
He said it. Ah, Myra, how many ghosts must have flitted across your memory then!
“You’ve made me so happy, dear,” she said softly.
“No—you’ve made me happy. Don’t you know—Myra——”
“I know.”
“For good?”
“For good. I’ve got this, you see.” And she raised the diamond solitaire to her lips. She knew how to do things, did Myra.
“Good-night.”
“Good-night. Good-night.”
Like a gossamer fairy in shimmering rose she ran up the wide stairs and her cheeks were glowing wildly as she rang the elevator bell.
At the end of a fortnight she got a telegram from him saying that his family had returned from the West and expected her up in Westchester County for a week’s visit. Myra wired her train time, bought three new evening dresses and packed her trunk.
It was a cool November evening when she arrived, and stepping from the train in the late twilight she shivered slightly and looked eagerly round for Knowleton. The station platform swarmed for a moment with men returning from the city; there was a shouting medley of wives and chauffeurs, and a great snorting of automobiles as they backed and turned and slid away. Then before she realized it the platform was quite deserted and not a single one of the luxurious cars remained. Knowleton must have expected her on another train.
With an almost inaudible “Damn!” she started toward the Elizabethan station to telephone, when suddenly she was accosted by a very dirty, dilapidated man who touched his ancient cap to her and addressed her in a cracked, querulous voice.
“You Miss Harper?”
“Yes,” she confessed, rather startled. Was this unmentionable person by any wild chance the chauffeur?
“The chauffeur’s sick,” he continued in a high whine. “I’m his son.”
Myra gasped.
“You mean Mr. Whitney’s chauffeur?”
“Yes; he only keeps just one since the war. Great on economizin’—regelar Hoover.” He stamped his feet nervously and smacked enormous gauntlets together. “Well, no use waitin’ here gabbin’ in the cold. Le’s have your grip.”
Too amazed for words and not a little dismayed, Myra followed her guide to the edge of the platform, where she looked in vain for a car. But she was not left to wonder long, for the person led her steps to a battered old flivver, wherein was deposited her grip.
“Big car’s broke,” he explained. “Have to use this or walk.”
He opened the front door for her and nodded.
“Step in.”
“I b’lieve I’ll sit in back if you don’t mind.”
“Surest thing you know,” he cackled, opening the back door. “I thought the trunk bumpin’ round back there might make you nervous.”
“What trunk?”
“Yourn.”
“Oh, didn’t Mr. Whitney—can’t you make two trips?”
He shook his head obstinately.
“Wouldn’t allow it. Not since the war. Up to rich people to set ’n example; that’s what Mr. Whitney says. Le’s have your check, please.”
As he disappeared Myra tried in vain to conjure up a picture of the chauffeur if this was his son. After a mysterious argument with the station agent he returned, gasping violently, with the trunk on his back. He deposited it in the rear seat and climbed up in front beside her.
It was quite dark when they swerved out of the road and up a long dusky driveway to the Whitney place, whence lighted windows flung great blots of cheerful, yellow light over the gravel and grass and trees. Even now she could see that it was very beautiful, that its blurred outline was Georgian Colonial and that great shadowy garden parks were flung out at both sides. The car plumped to a full stop before a square stone doorway and the chauffeur’s son climbed out after her and pushed open the outer door.
“Just go right in,” he cackled; and as she passed the threshold she heard him softly shut the door, closing out himself and the dark.
Myra looked round her. She was in a large somber hall paneled in old English oak and lit by dim shaded lights clinging like luminous yellow turtles at intervals along the wall. Ahead of her was a broad staircase and on both sides there were several doors, but there was no sight or sound of life, and an intense stillness seemed to rise ceaselessly from the deep crimson carpet.
She must have waited there a full minute before she began to have that unmistakable sense of someone looking at her. She forced herself to turn casually round.
A sallow little man, bald and clean shaven, trimly dressed in a frock coat and white spats, was standing a few yards away regarding her quizzically. He must have been fifty at the least, but even before he moved she had noticed a curious alertness about him—something in his pose which promised that it had been instantaneously assumed and would be instantaneously changed in a moment. His tiny hands and feet and the odd twist to his eyebrows gave him a faintly elfish expression, and she had one of those vague transient convictions that she had seen him before, many years ago.
For a minute they stared at each other in silence and then she flushed slightly and discovered a desire to swallow.
“I suppose you’re Mr. Whitney.” She smiled faintly and advanced a step toward him. “I’m Myra Harper.”
For an instant longer he remained silent and motionless, and it flashed across Myra that he might be deaf; then suddenly he jerked into spirited life exactly like a mechanical toy started by the pressure of a button.
“Why, of course—why, naturally. I know—ah!” he exclaimed excitedly in a high-pitched elfin voice. Then raising himself on his toes in a sort of attenuated ecstasy of enthusiasm and