"Mr. Franklin ordered his car round ten minutes ago, madam, and has driven off to New York."
New York! Then he had given her away, after all, and left her in the lurch. What on earth was she going to do now?
XI
It was twenty minutes to one when Franklin brought his car to a stop at the Willow Tree Club in West Fifty-seventh Street. Malcolm usually dropped in to this rendezvous of writing men, artists and good fellows generally to read the papers, about midday. There was more than a chance that he might be lunching there.
The city lay weltering under a pall of humidity. As about a great hive the people moved like tired bees. Flags lay comatose around their posts, striped awnings hung limply above the windows of those unhappy souls who could not get away, and the buildings which reared their heads up to the sky seemed to perspire.
Franklin enquired for his friend at the office, was told that he had been in but had left half an hour before, murmured a mere second-grade oath, and being a member of the club himself, went into the reading room. He remembered that he needed certain things from Spaldings', especially flies, and knowing from long experience that he had better not trust to his memory, decided to write a brief letter, then and there.
A pale man was sitting within easy reach of the long magazine table. He looked up with the slightly antagonistic expression characteristic of men in clubs who have had a room to themselves, and wondered what sort of lucky creature the interloper was who could afford to achieve such a superb tan in a world of work and effort.
Franklin caught his eye, registered the fact that he had never seen him before and didn't much care if he never did again, and sat down at a writing table behind a book-case in the corner of the room.
After a few moments he was aware of the entrance of someone else because the pale man sang out a greeting, but he had concentrated on his list and what was said didn't reach him. He searched his brain for everything that he needed in the way of flies and tackle, endeavored to make his writing more legible than it usually was and was about to address the envelope when he caught the name of Vanderdyke. It was not so much the mention of the name that made him prick up his ears as the rather ribald tone in which it was said.
"I was surprised to read all that glorification in this morning's papers," he heard. "Gossip had it that you were very much in the running, York."