Malcolm and Ida Larpent had gone to bed. And the fat girl with the big bow and her young friends had disappeared. The Victrola was silent. There were no lights in the drawing-room or the sun parlor, but the click of billiard balls came into the foyer and the reek of cheap cigars. Two colored bell boys on the verge of sleep sat near the desk. Outside the frogs were still at work on their endless ensemble.
Beatrix nodded and smiled and went upstairs. She had left her key in Mrs. Keene's room. Franklin hung about aimlessly for ten minutes reading the railroad timetables with no interest and the printed notices to visitors and looking at the colored advertisements of steamships and whisky and magazines, without taking them in. Yes, the episode had failed. He was beat,—beat to a frazzle. What was going to happen next?
Ida Larpent heard him stride along the passage, go into his room and shut the door. Through the thin walls she could hear him shunt a chair and do something to his windows and move about.
She wore a curious smile and an almost transparent nightgown. Her black hair was all about her shoulders and in her eyes there was a strange eagerness.
For half an hour she sat as still as a statue watching the hands of her little diamond-studded watch. Her opportunity had come. She was going to seize it. She knew men, no one better. This one needed love and she, yes, she of all women would give it to him.
In that long, peculiar half hour during which her body was without movement, her brain worked and her heart raced. She loved and would make a sacrifice for love. That was the burden of her inward song. Not of the future, not of freedom from money worries, not of mercenary things,—love, her first great love and its fulfilment. Of that she thought, smiling, and thanking her stars.
And when the half hour was up she rose, put on a peignoir, slipped out of her room on the tips of her little pink slippers and tapped at Franklin's door. He called out "Come" and she went in.
He was sitting in a dressing gown in a cane chair, under the electric lamp that hung from the middle of the ceiling, with a pipe in his mouth and a book in his hand and his feet on a cranky table. There was a cloud of good tobacco smoke round his head.
He sprang to his feet at the sight of her. Although there was nothing of the frightened woman about her, the only thing that occurred to him was that she needed his help. A thief after her rings, probably.
"What's the matter?" instinctively lowering his voice. "Anyone in your room?"