“Why didn’t you tell me?” demanded she.
“You guessed it. What was the use?” evaded he.
“Guess?” The girl laughed. “You call that guessing because you’re merely a man. It was certainty—proof—plain as if he had said so. But then, I’ve known it for weeks. Now, keep well back in the elevator, dear, for he mustn’t see you as I get out.”
When the elevator was slowing for the parlor floor Richmond caught his daughter’s hand and pressed it convulsively. “Good luck!” he said in an undertone. “If you don’t win to-day we’ll follow him to France.”
“To the ends of the earth,” laughed she, kissing his hand and gayly pushing him back to a rear corner of the car.
The door closed behind her and the car resumed its descent; of all the thoughts boiling in Richmond’s excited brain not one was related to the strangeness of his own conduct or to the amazing transformation in a cold, tyrannical nature. In fact, the transformation was apparent rather than real. The chase had ever dominated him—the passion for the chase. And it was dominating him now.
In the wall opposite the elevator, and the width of the rather wide room from it, was a long mirror. No man could well have been freer from physical vanity than this big, self-conscious Roger Wade. Beyond his human duty of making himself inoffensive to the eye in the matter of clothing, he did nothing whatever toward personal adornment. Yet as Beatrice advanced he was primping industriously and unconsciously. To occupy his agitated mind he was standing before the mirror smoothing his hair, arranging his tie, fussing with the hang of the big, loose, dark-blue suit that gave his splendid figure an air of freedom. Their eyes met in the glass. He did not turn, but gazed at her—and who would not have been charmed by a creature so redolent of springtime freshness, from the yellow roses in her hat, looking as if they were just from the garden, to the scrupulously neat effect of stockings and ties? She stood beside him, her yellow roses nodding in line with his ear. And they made a delightful picture—a rare harmony of contrasts and symmetries.
She laughed radiantly. “Chang!” she cried.
He was straightway so disconcerted that her amusement could not but increase. “Through primping?” mocked she.