When several minutes had gone by in a silence which struck her soon as awesome, she turned slowly round, only to find herself alone.
She ran into the hall, but there was no one there. He must have gone downstairs. Leaning over the baluster, she called to him.
“Rash! Rash!”
But only Wildgoose, the manservant, answered from below. “Mr. Allerton had just left the ’ouse, miss.”
Chapter II
While Allerton and Miss Walbrook had been conducting this debate a dissimilar yet parallel scene was enacted in a mean house in a mean street on the other side of the Park. Viewed from the outside, the house was one of those survivals of more primitive times which you will still run across in the richest as well as in the poorest districts of New York. A tiny wooden structure of two low stories, it connected with the sidewalk by a flight of steps of a third of the height of the whole façade. Flat-roofed and clap-boarded, it had once been painted gray with white facings, but time, weather, and soot had defaced these neat colors to a hideous pepper-and-salt.
Within, a toy entry led directly to a toy stairway, and by a door on the left into a toy living-room. In the toy living-room a man of forty-odd was saying to a girl of perhaps twenty-three,
“So you’ll not give it up, won’t you?”