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The following morning Belle took Nicholas Kenyon for a walk. Dressed in a suit of blue flannel with white bone buttons, with a pair of white spats gleaming over patent leather shoes and a grey hat stuck at an angle of forty-five, Kenyon looked as fresh and as dapper as though he had been to bed the night before at ten o'clock. He had, as a matter of fact, come home with the milk; but he was one of those men who possess the enviable gift of looking healthy and untired after the sort of nights which make the ordinary man turn to chemistry and vibro-massage.
Belle had sported a new hat for the occasion.
This fact Kenyon realized with that queer touch of intuition which was characteristic of him. "By Jove!" he said. "That's something like a hat, Belle. Hearty congratulations. You suit it to perfection."
Belle beamed upon him. "But you would say that anyhow, wouldn't you?"
"Perfectly true; but in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred I shouldn't mean it."
They turned into Madison Avenue. It was an exquisite morning. The whole city was bathed in sun, but the refreshing tang of late autumn was in the air. Most of the large houses were still closed, their owners lingering in the country or abroad. All the same there was the inevitable amount of traffic in the streets and apparently the usual number of passers-by. The city can be—according to the strange little creatures who write society news—"utterly deserted" and yet contain all its teeming millions.
"And what may that be?" asked Kenyon, pointing to the heavy white buttresses of a church which backed on the street.
"Oh, that's the Roman Catholic Cathedral."
"Roman Catholic, eh? I noticed churches everywhere as we drove up from the docks,—more churches than pubs apparently, and yet I suppose it would be quite absurd to imagine that New Yorkers imbibe their alcohol entirely in the form of religion."
"Quite," said Belle, dryly. "Although we have a hundred religions and only five cocktails."
"I see you also go in for antique furniture."
Belle laughed. "You have a quick eye," she said. "There's so much genuine Old English stuff in this city that if it were sent to England there wouldn't be room for it on shore. Tell me; what are your plans?"
"Well," said Kenyon, "I'm going to accept your father's perfectly charming hospitality for a fortnight and then take rooms in a bachelor apartment-house, of which Graham has told me, for the winter."
"You're going to settle down here?" cried Belle.
"Rather,—for six months. I'm here to study the conditions, make myself familiar with the characteristics and draw from both what I hope will be the foundations of much usefulness." Kenyon considered that he had enveloped his true mission—which was to lighten the pockets of all unwary young men—with a satirical verbiage that did him credit.
"I thought that perhaps you'd come for some other reason," said Belle, whose whole face showed her disappointment.
Kenyon shot a quick glance at her. How naïve she was—how very much too easy—but, nevertheless, how very young and desirable. "That goes without saying, you delicious thing," he replied, closing his hand warmly round her arm for a moment and so bringing the light back to her eyes. "By the way," he continued, "what's the matter with Graham?"
"I don't know that anything's the matter with Graham."
"I think so. I notice a worried look about him that he didn't have at Oxford; that he seems to be always on the verge of telling me something, and drawing back at the last minute. I must make a point of finding out what his trouble is. Peter and I were discussing it this morning after breakfast. We're both a bit anxious about him. Do you know if your father has noticed it?"
"Father? Oh, he doesn't notice anything. He believes that Graham is working very hard and doing well. He knows less about what goes on in our house than the people who live next door."
"That's rather a pity. I'm all for complete confidence between father and son. However, I shall play father to Graham for a bit and see what can be done for him. He puzzles me. There's a mystery somewhere."
Something of this mystery was disclosed to Kenyon and Peter that night. After dining them both at the Harvard Club—a place which filled Kenyon with admiration and surprise—Graham suddenly suggested, with a queer touch of excitement, that they should go with him to his apartment.
"Your apartment?" said Peter. "What on earth do you mean?"
"Well, come and see," said Graham.
The two elder men looked at each other in amazement. Kenyon's quick mind ran ahead, but Peter, the unsophisticated, was quite unable to understand what in the world Graham wanted an apartment for when he lived at home. They all three left West Forty-fourth Street in silence and walked arm in arm down Fifth Avenue as far as Twenty-eighth Street. Here they turned westward and followed Graham, who was wearing an air of rather sheepish pride, up the steps of an old brown stone house with rather a shabby portico.
"Dismal looking hole," said Peter.
"Wait!" said Graham, and he put his finger on a bell. The door opened automatically and he led the way into a scantily furnished hall and up three flights of stairs, whose red carpet was in the autumn of its days. Drawing up in front of a door on the left of the passage he rang again, and after a lengthy pause was admitted to a small apartment by a colored maid, who gave a wide grin of recognition.
"Come right in," said Graham. "Lily, take our hats and coats. Don't leave them about in the hall. Hang them up and then go and get some drinks."
Kenyon looked about him curiously. He could see that the place was newly furnished and that everything had been chosen by a man. He glanced into the dining-room. The pictures were sporting and the furniture mission. He detected no sign of a woman's hand anywhere. He began to be puzzled. He had expected to find something quite different. But when Graham opened the door of the sitting-room and said: "Well, here we are, Ita!" and he saw a small, dark, olive-skinned girl rise up from a settee and run forward to Graham with a little cry of welcome, he knew that his deduction of the situation had been a right one. So this was the mystery.
Still with the same air of sheepish pride, Graham said: "Peter, this is Miss Ita Strabosck. My brother, Ita. And this is Nicholas Kenyon, who's a great friend of mine. They've just come over from England, and so of course I've brought them to see you."
The little girl held out a very shy hand, and said: "I am so glad. Eet ees very good of you to come."
In a curiously plain tight frock of some soft black material, cut square across her tiny breasts, and leaving her arms bare almost to the shoulders, she stood, with one knee bent, looking from one man to the other with a sort of wistful eagerness to be treated kindly. She held a tiny black Teddy bear with red eyes against her cheek, like a child.
Peter, for a reason which he was unable to explain to himself, felt a wave of sympathy go over him. He not only accepted the girl on her face value, but somehow or other believed her to be younger and more romantic than she looked. She seemed to him to have stepped out of the pages of some Arabian book—to be a little exotic whom Graham must have discovered far away from her native hot-house. He liked the way in which her thick hair was arranged round her face, and he would have sworn that she was without guile.
Not so Kenyon. "Great Scott!" he said to himself. "Here's a little devil for you. Our young friend Graham has had his leg pulled. I've seen mosquitoes before, but the poison of this one will take all the ingenuity of an expert to counteract."
He sat down and watched the girl, who threw one quick antagonistic glance at him and attached herself to Peter, to whom she talked in monosyllables. She might only very recently have left a Convent School, except that her dog-like worship of Graham seemed to prove that she owed him a deep debt of gratitude for some great service.
Graham watched her, too, and his expression showed Kenyon that even if he didn't love her he believed in her and was proud of himself.