“Dead! God!”
Then he walked swiftly away into Madison Avenue, where he soon found a car going southward.
Chapter XXIV
Barbara was late for breakfast. Miss Walbrook, the aunt, was scanning the morning paper, her refined, austere Americanism being as noticeable in the dining-room as elsewhere in the house. Everything was slender and strong; everything was American, unless it was the Persian rug. On the paneled walls there were but three portraits, a Boston ancestress, in lace cap and satins, painted by Copley; a Philadelphia ancestor in the Continental uniform, painted by Gilbert Stuart; and her New York grandmother, painted by Thomas Sully, looking over her shoulder with the wild backward glance that artist gives to the girl Victoria in the Metropolitan Museum. In a flat cabinet along a wall was the largest collection of old American glass to be found in the country.
Barbara rushed in, with apologies for being late. “I didn’t sleep a wink. It doesn’t seem to me as if I should ever sleep again. Where’s my cup?”
“Wildgoose will bring it. As the coffee had grown cold he took that and the cup to keep warm. What’s the matter?”
Wildgoose stepped in with the missing essentials. A full-fed, round-faced, rubicund man of fifty-odd he looked a perennial twenty-five. Barbara began to minister to herself.
“Oh, everything’s the matter. I told you yesterday that that girl had run away. Well, I begin to wish she’d run back again.”