“Ain’t hyar,” airily returned the darkey. He was about to turn away from this plainly dressed woman, who had no claim on any eagerness of service when his eyes chanced to fall on a token of quality above her seeming station. He suddenly noted the jeweled card case as she returned the card to it, and the gold mesh bag, and he vouchsafed pleasantly:
“I noticed myse’f the announcement in the evenin’ paper, but it is his brudder stoppin’ hyar.”
That moment her eyes fell upon Adrian Ducie standing in one of the groups of men smoking in the office. Her impulse was like that of a drowning creature clutching at a straw. Without an instant of hesitation, without even a vague intention of appropriately employing the intermediary services of the limp bell-boy, with a wild, hysteric fear that a moment’s waiting would lose her the opportunity, she dashed into the midst of the office, and, speechless, and pallid, and trembling, she seized Adrian by the arm.
CHAPTER XVIII
Adrian Ducie looked in startled amazement down into her white, drawn face with its hollow, appealing eyes, and quivering lips that could not enunciate a word. He did not recognize her for one moment. Then his expression hardened, and his gaze grew steady. With dextrous fingers he took his hat from his head and his cigar from his lips with one hand, for she held the other arm with a grip as of steel. The moony luster of the electric lights shone down upon a scene as silent and as motionless as if, Gorgon-like, her entrance had stricken it into stone; the groups of men who had been smoking standing about the floor, the loungers in the armchairs, the clerks behind the counter were for the moment as if petrified, blankly staring.
“What can I do for you?” Adrian asked courteously, and the calm, clear tones of his voice pervaded the silence like the tones of a bell.
In her keen sensitiveness she noted the absence of any form of greeting or salutation. He would not call her name for the enlightenment of these gazing strangers in this public place, in the scene she had made. Oh, how could she have so demeaned herself, she wondered, as to need such protection, such observance on his part of the delicacy she had disregarded. She despised herself to have incurred the necessity, yet with both her little gloved hands she clung to his arm with a convulsive strength of grasp which he could not have shaken off without a struggle that would have much edified the gazing crowd, all making their own inferences as to the unknown significance of the scene. Such good breeding as it individually possessed had begun to assert itself against the shock and numbing effects of surprise, and there was the sound of movement and the murmur of resumed conversation which induced Adrian Ducie to hope that the one word she suddenly gasped had not been overheard.
“Randal,” she began in a broken voice, and the look in his eyes struck her dumb. They held a spark of actual fire that scorched every delicate sensibility within her. But it was like the ignition of a fuse—it set the whole train of gunpowder into potentiality. With sudden intention he looked over his shoulder and signaled to a gentleman at a little distance, staring, too, but not in the least recognizing Mrs. Floyd-Rosney.
“We will go into the reception room and talk the matter over,” he said decisively. “Colonel Kenwynton will give us the benefit of his advice.”
Colonel Kenwynton had been trained in the school of maneuvers and strategy. Off came his hat from his old white head, and with a resonant “Certainly! Certainly!” he advanced on the other side of Paula, who noticed that he followed Ducie’s example and did not speak her name. “Good evening, good evening, madam, I trust I see you well!” was surely salutation enough to satisfy the most exacting requirements of etiquette.