I suppose changing your mind often is a good, clean thing for your soul, just as changing your clothes is for your body.
We had a few hours to flash round Chicago in a motor car, seeing pretty, young-looking parks, and a great lake like the sea with wonderful buildings along its shore, and a sky like a painting by Turner. I was bitterly disappointed not to get the telegram Tony had promised to send, addressed to the Blackstone Hotel, where it had been arranged beforehand that we should lunch and dine. The court-martial was to have been held on the eighth day after Eagle March's arrest, the day before our arrival in Chicago, and meanwhile I had lived only for the telegram. My impatience to know the worst—or best—had been like a flame in my blood and brain. When it was time to take the fast train to New York in the evening, and no telegram had come, it seemed as if that flame gave a devouring leap, and then went out, leaving my body a burnt-up shell.
The next morning we were in New York, where Mr. Dalziel met his wife and Milly. I hoped that he might have read some news of El Paso in the morning papers, and that he would spring it upon us in the railway station where we paused, being charming and affectionate to each other, and making plans to meet again before our party sailed. I couldn't have questioned him to save my life, any more than I could have cried out in fearful nightmares which I remembered, when the earth was about to swallow me up, or a mountain fall on to my head. Surely, I thought, if there were news about the court-martial it would be interesting enough to the Dalziel family for the man to mention it, if only because Tony was to be a witness in the case! But the affair might have been more remote from us all than a destructive tidal wave in China, judging by Mr. Dalziel's oblivion of it. He and Father talked about our luck in grabbing cabins at short notice on the Mauretania; his wife and Mrs. Main discussed getting seats for that night at D'Annunzio's great moving-picture play, which had come on at a theatre in New York; his daughter and Diana chatted about the earliest date when Milly could persuade her mother to sail for England. I longed to scream at them, "Oh, you hard, unfeeling wretches!" But instead I stood outwardly patient, a good, well-behaved young girl with a little mincing smile on my face. Only the smile was frozen so hard you could have knocked it off with a hammer.
We were going to Kitty Main's flat, which she called her "apartment," and the Dalziels were going to their house, but it was not to be a regular parting. We were to dine with them (somehow the idea was borne in upon me that dear Mrs. Dalziel wanted naughty, shilly-shallying Peggy to see what lovely surroundings might be hers as Tony's wife); all of us were to lunch next day at Delmonico's, as Kitty's guests; the Dalziels were to motor us over to Long Island for a glimpse of their country place there; and they were to see us off on the Mauretania. But that would not be until five days had passed. Meanwhile, there would be time for telegrams and even letters from El Paso.
At last, after all the noisy planning of things to do, the two parties contrived to tear themselves from one another, and we got away from the wonderful station in Mrs. Main's motor car, which had come to meet us—a most impressive motor car which needed only a coronet or at worst a crest, on its door. Perhaps, however, judging from present signs, that lack might be supplied later.
Her "apartment" was in a marvellously ornate sky-scraper; a huge brown block like a plum cake for a Titan tea party, which would have made Buckingham Palace or any other royal residence in Europe look a toy. It was in the highest story, according to Kitty the most desirable, because you had all the air there and none of the noise; just like living on a mountain, with a lift to the top. I wondered what she would think of poor old Ballyconal, when she came to see it!
The first thing I did was to wire my temporary address to Tony, and hate myself because I hadn't done it before. Until I met Father and Di I didn't know where we were to stay in New York, for everything had been settled through letters and telegrams, with as little useful information as possible. If I had remembered in Chicago that Tony had no idea where I would be in New York, there need have been no more delay in my getting the news. But something seemed to be strangely wrong at his end of the line, for even when there had been time for him to get my telegram and send another, no answer came. Nothing arrived for Di, either; but apparently she was expecting no wire. She must have had some human curiosity, if not anxiety, to know the fate of a man who had been as much to her as Eagle March had been; but she was thinking of his trial, I suppose, entirely from Sidney Vandyke's point of view, and she had no uneasiness as to the result for Sidney. As for the papers, though I quite cleverly managed to find other things than football news, I could discover nothing about the court-martial on Captain March. I had to tell myself that perhaps they didn't put such affairs in newspapers, for I was too ignorant to think of trying to hunt up the army and navy official journals.
We had been three days in New York in great heat, which Kitty took pains to tell us was most unseasonable, when one morning a thunderstorm accompanied by terrific wind came up, preventing us from going out as we had intended. Kitty's floor at the top of the building, with its steel supports, actually gave the effect of swaying in the blast like an overgrown spear of wheat, a phenomenon Kitty took as a matter of course. So we Britishers had to do the same, no matter how we felt, to show that we were as brave as Americans. In the midst of the storm the postman's ring sounded reassuringly, as if to say that we were not cut off from earth; and a calm maid, used to hanging on insectlike by her antennæ to the top grain on the wheat stalk, quietly presented a silver tray with letters to her mistress.
"One for dear Diana," Kitty announced, picking up a large purple-sealed and monogrammed envelope, such as Sidney Vandyke had made peculiarly his own. And I had only time for a heartbeat before she added, "Two for little Peggy!"
I never much relished being patronized as "little Peggy" by my would-be stepmother, but she might safely have called me anything from a pterodactyl to a hippopotamus just then. I had caught a glimpse of the uppermost envelope of the two as she doled the letters out. In a flash I knew that Eagle March had written to me.