“No, he never does. I often tell him that.”
Mrs. Horncastle smiled faintly. “Come, quick, then,” she said, “for he may come HERE first.”
Opening the door she passed into the half-dark and empty hall. “Now run!” She heard the quick rustle of Mrs. Barker's skirt die away in the distance, the opening and shutting of a door—silence—and then turned back into her own room.
She was none too soon. Presently she heard Barker's voice saying, “Thank you, I can find the way,” his still buoyant step on the staircase, and then saw his brown curls rising above the railing. The light streaming through the open door of the sitting room into the half-lit hall had partially dazzled him, and, already bewildered, he was still more dazzled at the unexpected apparition of the smiling face and bright eyes of Mrs. Horncastle standing in the doorway.
“You have fairly caught us,” she said, with charming composure; “but I had half a mind to let you wander round the hotel a little longer. Come in.” Barker followed her in mechanically, and she closed the door. “Now, sit down,” she said gayly, “and tell me how you knew we were here, and what you mean by surprising us at this hour.”
Barker's ready color always rose on meeting Mrs. Horncastle, for whom he entertained a respectful admiration, not without some fear of her worldly superiority. He flushed, bowed, and stared somewhat blankly around the room, at the familiar walls, at the chair from which Mrs. Horncastle had just risen, and finally at his wife's glove, which Mrs. Horncastle had a moment before ostentatiously thrown on the table. Seeing which she pounced upon it with assumed archness, and pretended to conceal it.
“I had no idea my wife was here,” he said at last, “and I was quite surprised when the man told me, for she had not written to me about it.” As his face was brightening, she for the first time noticed that his frank gray eyes had an abstracted look, and there was a faint line of contraction on his youthful forehead. “Still less,” he added, “did I look for the pleasure of meeting you. For I only came here to inquire about my old partner, Demorest, who arrived from Europe a few days ago, and who should have reached Hymettus early this afternoon. But now I hear he came all the way by coach instead of by rail, and got off at the cross-road, and we must have passed each other on the different trails. So my journey would have gone for nothing, only that I now shall have the pleasure of going back with you and Kitty. It will be a lovely drive by moonlight.”
Relieved by this revelation, it was easy work for Mrs. Horncastle to launch out into a playful, tantalizing, witty—but, I grieve to say, entirely imaginative—account of her escapade with Mrs. Barker. How, left alone at the San Francisco hotel while their gentlemen friends were enjoying themselves at Hymettus, they resolved upon a little trip, partly for the purpose of looking into some small investments of their own, and partly for the fun of the thing. What funny experiences they had! How, in particular, one horrid inquisitive, vulgar wretch had been boring a European fellow passenger who was going to Hymettus, finally asking him where he had come from last, and when he answered “Hymettus,” thought the man was insulting him—
“But,” interrupted the laughing Barker, “that passenger may have been Demorest, who has just come from Greece, and surely Kitty would have recognized him.”
Mrs. Horncastle instantly saw her blunder, and not only retrieved it, but turned it to account. Ah, yes! but by that time poor Kitty, unused to long journeys and the heat, was utterly fagged out, was asleep, and perfectly unrecognizable in veils and dusters on the back seat of the coach. And this brought her to the point—which was, that she was sorry to say, on arriving, the poor child was nearly wild with a headache from fatigue and had gone to bed, and she had promised not to disturb her.