"In three-quarters of an hour. Who's speaking?"
"Mr. Oscar Fischer. Keep anything you have for me."
He threw down the receiver for fear of a refusal, packed a few things feverishly in a dressing bag, dashed the rest of his correspondence into his pocket, and with the bag in one hand, and an overcoat over the other arm, he hastened out into the street. He was obliged at first to board a street car. Afterwards he found a taxicab, and drove under the great wooden shed as the last siren was blowing. He hurried up the gangway, a grim, remorseful figure, a sense of defeat gnawing at his heart, a bitter, haunting fear still with him even when, with a shriek of the tugs, the great steamer swung into the river. He was leaving forever the work to which he had given so much of his life, leaving it a fugitive and dishonoured. The blaze of lights, the screaming of the great ferry-boats, all the triumphant, brazen noises of the mighty city, sounded like a requiem to him as in the darkest part of the promenade deck he leaned over the railing and nursed his agony, the supreme agony of an ambitious man—failure.
CHAPTER XXXVII
"What has become," Mrs. Theodore Hastings asked her niece one afternoon about a month later, "of your delightful friend, Mr. Lutchester?"
Pamela laid down her book and looked across at her aunt with wide-open eyes.
"Why, I thought you didn't like him, aunt?"
"I cannot remember saying so, my dear," Mrs. Hastings replied. "I had nothing against the man himself. It was simply his attitude with regard to some of your uncle's plans, of which we disapproved."
Pamela nodded. They were seated on the piazza of the Hastings' country house at Manchester.
"I see!… And uncle's plans," she went on reflectively, "have become a little changed, haven't they?"