Pushed the engineer into the salon.
"Here his curiosity overcame him and he cautiously opened the salon door and peered down the corridor. A man carrying his bag, cane, and umbrella, an overcoat on his arm, was walking rapidly toward the staircase. He drew in his head and waited. Five minutes passed, then ten. He tried the dressing-room door. It was still locked. Stepping out into the corridor he turned the knob and walked into the dressing-room. It was empty. On the floor was a pair of corsets, some petticoats, and a dress!"
"Skipped! Well, by Jove!" cried Marny. "Nihilist, wasn't she?"
"He never knew; doesn't to this day."
"What was she then?" persisted Marny.
"I don't know. My only solution was that she was herself in danger of her life and had cooked up the yarn about her brother to get out of Vienna."
"Did he get his passport back?" asked Stirling.
"Yes, three months afterward by mail to his bankers from the Hotel Metropole. She, or somebody else, had been half over Europe with it; twice to St. Petersburg and once to Warsaw. The clothes and bag he never heard of. The waiter at the Café Ivanoff—the one she called Polski—had disappeared and he dare not make any inquiries."
"But I don't see why he was afraid, an American like him," broke in Marny.
"Let up, Marny!" exclaimed Boggs. "Don't spoil a good yarn. What difference does it make who she was? You've got a first rate doll, don't pick it to pieces to find out what it's stuffed with; give your imagination play and enjoy it. She suggests a dozen things to me, but I don't want any one of them proved. She might have been chief of a band of poisoners with a private graveyard in her cellar; her smile, perdition; her glance, death. She could also have eluded the Secret Service of Russia for years in disguises that the mother who bore her wouldn't have known her in;—her exploits the talk of all Europe. Then her miraculous escapes—one for instance across the frontier in a sledge on forged passports, and the disguise of an officer, her maid dressed as an orderly, both of them smothered in priceless furs; her being trailed to her hotel by a sleuth; her lightning change of costume to low-neck gown and jewels given her by a Russian Grand Duke whose body was found in the Neva the morning after she left; the murder of the sleuth, with a card tied to the stiletto marked with a skull and crossbones. You fellows are going wild over this new French impressionistic craze—the vague, the mysterious, and the suggestive. Why not apply it to literature? If a man can paint a figure with three dabs of his brush, why can't a man draw a character or a situation with three strokes of his pen? You are too literal, old man!"
"Anything else, you overstuffed, loquacious sausage?" cried Marny.
"Yes," retorted Boggs. "That woman was no doubt a member of the——"
"Stop, you beggar!" cried Jack Stirling. "Don't let him get loose again, Marny! Stuff a pipe in his mouth. Boggs, you are the only man I know who can start his mouth going and go away and leave it. Here, fellows, get on your feet and line up and receive the spoilt child of fashion. He's coming upstairs: I know his step."
At this instant Woods's body was thrust around the jamb of the door. He still wore the rose in his button-hole, the one Miss B. J.—the original of the portrait—had pinned there.
Mac sprang up and caught the intruder by the shoulders before he had time to open his mouth.
"Been having a tea, have you, you gilt-edged fraud! A highly perfumed powder-puff tea, with lace on the edges and two flounces. 'Oh, how exquisite, dear Mr. Woods! And is it really all hand-painted? and did you do it all yourself? How enormously clever you are—How lovely—How—' Got pretty sick of that sort of taffy after they had gormed you up with it for three hours, didn't you, Woods? and you had to come up where you could breathe! Now rip off that undertaker's coat, throw away that rose, get into that sketching jacket, and sit down here and disinfect yourself with a pipe—" and Mac's hearty laugh rang through the room.
PART IX
Around the Embers of the Dying Fire.
Spring had come. The trees in the old Square were tuneful with impatient birds ready to move in and begin housekeeping as soon as the buds poked their yellow heads out of their nestings of bark. The eager sun, who had been trying all winter to gain the corner of Mac's studio window, had finally carried the sash and grimy pane by assault: its beams were now basking on the Daghestan rug in full defiance of the smouldering coals crouching half-dead in their bed of ashes.
