When he had recovered from his emotion, I soon found that the old fellow had long ago emerged from all personal sense of disgrace with his usual corklike irrepressibility. He chatted with me cheerily, calling me, “Old chap,” just as though nothing painful had happened to separate us. On being ousted from Chelsea, he had immediately dropped back, with something like a sigh of relief, into his former world of momentous trifles—philanthropy and fowls. “We lived at a terrible pace, old chap. It was wearing us out. We couldn’t have stood it.”
He spoke as if the abdication of his brief period of affluence had been voluntary. I scented here one of his spuffling explanations to his neighbors for his precipitate return to the boarding-house.
On inquiry I found that all his philanthropic societies had forgiven and taken him back. After sulking a while and flirting with various paid secretaries, they had agreed for economy’s sake to let bygones be bygones. They had been unable to find any other person who would serve them as loyally without salary, and who at the same time was able to offer up such beautiful extempore prayers. The list of their contributors had afforded Rapson his happiest hunting-ground. Procuring my uncle’s services for nothing was their only way of getting anything back.
“And what about Rapson?” I asked. “Do you still believe in him?”
He shook his head dolefully. “I begin to lose faith, Dante; I begin to doubt.”
“But have you heard from him since he went away?”
“Never a word.”
He hesitated and then he said, “There’s Kitty, you know. He didn’t do the straight thing by her. No, I’m afraid Rapson wasn’t a good man.”
At mention of Kitty I pricked up my ears; I had often wondered about her. “What had Kitty to do with him?” I asked. “Were they engaged?”
“No, unfortunately.”