"I think so," said Blythe. "Mrs. Laura Stedham is—"
"Laura Stedham? Known her all my life—tried my infernallest to marry her when I was a cub, but she wouldn't so much as look at me," said Scammel, cheerily. "She can have my cabin if I have to stay over here for the remainder of my natural life. How about you fellows?" addressing his companions.
It was all one to them, it appeared. If Scammel was willing to remain in London for a while longer, why—
"But I haven't the least idea of remaining in London," put in Scammel when they had got that far. "The night train for Paris for mine, now that I can't get away on the Mauretania. No use talking, Blythe, fate is against me. I want to be good, but I'm not allowed to be. I'll leave it to you or anybody else if I had the slightest idea of making Paris this trip. I've been fighting the temptation to hit up Paris ever since I've been over this time. Now, you see, I'm positively driven to it. Man comes along and grabs my homeward-bound cabin away from me. What else is there for it but Paris? Are you cubs going along with me?" turning to the two younger men.
The "cubs," it appeared, were quite willing to defer their meditated repentance until such time as Scammel might be ready to repent with them, and they proclaimed that Paris sounded good to them. Thus it was that Blythe was able to appear at the Savoy long before noon with the announcement that he had contrived to obtain three highly-desirable staterooms on the Mauretania.
"What should we ever have done without him?" said Laura to Louise, while Blythe lounged about—making occasional discreet exits—during their packing operations.
"Without Jerry Scammel and the two apt and obliging young New York pupils he is breaking in over here, you should say," observed Blythe.
"John! Was it dear old Jerry Scammel who did this for us?" asked Laura, blushing. "Well, I shall certainly bake him a cake or crochet him a pair of pulse-warmers or ear-laps or something as soon as he gets back to New York. He's a dear, and always was, and I always fight tooth and nail for him when the catty old dowagers call him the most dissipated man in New York. Jerry, to this day, declares to me, every time I meet him, that he holds the world's record for proposals to the same girl within a given time. I was the girl. I believe I was somewhat under sixteen and Jerry was not yet nineteen. He swears that he proposed to me forty-four times within one month. Of course he is wrong. It was only twenty-three."
Laura and Blythe purposely kept up this sort of small talk to divert Louise's thoughts from her mother's illness. Louise, heavy-hearted as she was, quite understood their kindly purpose, and successfully strove to appear entertained by their banter. But her foreboding was not easy to dispel. She knew that her mother would not have summoned her if her illness had not been of the gravest character; for in her last letter—the one she wrote on the night before leaving New York—she had insisted upon Louise having her London visit out. The girl had been filled with an intense happiness upon reading her mother's announcement of her departure from the house on the Drive. She had pictured a happy reunion with her mother and had begun immediately to make plans for the home which they should have together upon her return to New York. So that her mother's summons and Louise's certainty that the summons would never have been made had her mother's condition not been very serious, bore heavily upon her.
"I begin to fear that I have found my mother only to lose her again," she had said to Laura in talking over the cable message; and Laura, while professing to be shocked at Louise's premonition, had turned away to hide her tears; for the same premonition, better-grounded than Louise's on account of what she had heard from Blythe as to the visible decline into which Mrs. Treharne had seemed to be falling, was depressing Laura.