"Thanks."
"Quite a good sort, after all," thought Franklin. "Ripping hat. Always makes me feel like a man who goes behind the scenes after the last act."
A white-haired, chatty negro led Beatrix up two flights of carpetless stairs, along a narrow echoing passage to a door almost at the end of it.
"Don't knock," said Beatrix, and paid him with a smile.
The room was bare and large and barn-like. Its three large windows were screened. Its stained floor was rubbed and almost colorless. There was a cheap writing desk of yellow wood, a glass-topped dressing table to match, a stand with a water bottle on it and a shiver-inspiring white cuspidor beneath, several strips of thin-worn string matting and a lamp hanging from the centre of a none too clean ceiling.
Mrs. Lester Keene was lying on a bed with brass knobs which sagged perceptibly in the middle. Beatrix tip-toed to it and went down on her knees and put her arms round the little lady's shoulders. "Brownie dear, I've come," she said.
There was a great maternal cry, and a passion of tears.
"That's right. Weep, Brownie, my dear little Brownie, it will do you good. You were frightened for me, weren't you? The others wondered what was the matter with you, but you and I know, don't we? There are no secrets between us and now you'll get well, won't you? I'm so sorry!"
And the little woman clung weakly and fondly and stroked the face of the beautiful girl who meant so much to her and for whom she liked to think that she was responsible. "Oh, my dear, my dear," she cried, "you don't know what agonies I've been through, or how dreadful it was to see the yacht going away and you alone and unprotected with that man."
"Was it possible that I called him 'that man' then?" thought Beatrix.