"I can imagine so many things—"
But she jerked her little person away from me toward the two fellows who were trying dully to follow the scene they were witnessing without being able to seize its drift.
"Take all this stuff back again to where you brought it from. I'm not going to buy any of it. The idea of Billy Harrowby—" She repeated the name with a squeal, "Billy Harrowby! of all people in the world! Why, it's enough to drive me out of my senses. I suppose you don't know," she continued, switching back to me again, "that they've put a new man in your place at the Museum, over a year ago, a Frenchman; and that Vio has given them all your prints and etchings for a William Harrowby Memorial—that's what she called it—she had to do something of the sort after your tragic end, in common decency; and you considered a hero, something like Rupert Brooke and Alan Seeger, and now what's it to be—and you alive?" A dramatic gesture seemed to claim this confusion as something for which Fate had made her specially responsible. "Lulu, take me away, for Heaven's sake! I shall never look at a Chinese rug again without thinking—"
When the two ladies, with arms around each other's waist, had passed into the hallway, and out of sight, I turned to my colleagues, saying merely:
"I think we'd better roll these up and beat it."
Neither made any comment till we were in the lorry on our way back to Creed & Creed's, when one of them said in an awe-stricken tone:
"For the love o' Mike, Brogan, ain't your name—Brogan?"
CHAPTER VII
Two mornings later I was in Boston, sitting in the lobby of one of the great hotels. I had come by order of a telegram from my brother-in-law, Wolf Torrance. A note handed me on my arrival, late the previous evening, requested me to wait for him before attempting to see Violet. From her I had had nothing.
I had come as I was, with the hundred and thirty dollars of my savings in my pocket, but without taking the time to dress otherwise than in my working-man's best. Examining myself closely, now that I was face to face with my old life again, I could see that by imperceptible degrees my whole appearance had taken on those shades which distinguish the working-man from men in more sophisticated walks in life. Vio Harrowby as the wife of a working-man, or of any one looking like a working-man, was an inconceivable image.