Eight o’clock! Four more hours! At midnight the ship sailed.
He hurried to the apartment in Riverside Drive. The elevator-boys told him that the ladies were out. He refused to believe them and insisted on being taken up. He knocked at the door and pressed the button. Dead silence. Even Twinkles didn’t answer.
He was seized with panic. They might have gone to the Brevoort, expecting to say good-by to him there. He rushed back.. No one had inquired for him. The laughter of merry-makers in the white-mirrored dining-room was a mockery. He hid himself in his room upstairs—his room which would be a stranger’s to-morrow.
Nine! Ten! He sat with his head between his hands. He kept counting from one to a hundred, encouraging himself that the telephone would tinkle before he had completed the century. It did once—a wrong number. He attempted to get on to both the apartment and Fluffy’s a score of times. “They’re out—out—out.” The answer came back with maddening regularity. The telephone operators recognized his anxious voice; they cut him off, as though he were a troublesome child, before he had completed his question.
He grew ashamed. At last he grew angry. It wasn’t decent of Desire. He had given her no excuse for the way she was acting.
He pulled out his watch. Nearly eleven! Slipping into his coat and picking up his bag, he glanced round the room for the last time. What interminable hours he had wasted there—waiting for her, finding explanations for her, cutting cards to discover by necromancy whether she would marry him! With a sigh that was almost of relief, he opened the door and switched off the light.
While his bill was being receipted at the desk, he wrote out a cable to his mother:
“Sailing Christmas Eve. ’Mauretania”
It would reach them as they were sitting down to breakfast to-morrow—a kind of Christmas present.
At last he had made the step final. He wondered how far he had paralleled Hal. The comparison should end at this point; he had better things to do than to mope away his life.