"You don't know Mary—no, of course not!" young Mr. Vining rushed on. "She—she's the girl I'm going to marry, Anthony! Yes, I'm engaged, although it hasn't been announced yet. I've been engaged for a week now, and we—great Heaven! I can't think. I—why, Anthony, I was talking to her even at dinner last night and there was never a hint that she even meant to go out of the house. In fact, when we parted, she seemed rather bored at the idea of staying home and—why, not a soul knows even when she left the house! She's gone, Fry! She's just gone!"
A coarse nature ever, Johnson Boller winked at Anthony and turned his back!
"Mary! Why, my little Mary out alone at night——" young Robert choked. "She's just twenty, Anthony—a delicate, beautiful girl like that disappearing from the most beautiful, the happiest home in all New York! Why, from the day she was born, Dalton never spared her a penny to——"
"Eh? What Dalton?" Anthony asked suddenly.
"What? Theodore Dalton, of course. He's her father—Dalton, the patent-medicine man, Anthony. You must have met him? You know Theodore Dalton?"
Curiously, fortunately enough, sheer nervous tension jerked him away from Anthony Fry just then and set him to pacing the floor, a man distracted, a man unseeing, a man who recked of nothing on earth beyond his terrible and immediate grief.
And this was very well indeed, for Anthony was making himself conspicuous!
Anthony took three backward steps and looked at the unconscious Robert much as if the young man had branded himself a leper. He looked at Johnson Boller, too, although his eyes were blank—and then, one hand on his head, Anthony staggered straight out of the room and into the corridor; and, having gone that far, he turned and staggered down to the window at the end of the window-seat, where he collapsed much as if the bones had been whisked from his long, slender legs!
Here Johnson Boller, following, found him five seconds later. Mr. Boller, who was beginning to feel downright peculiar himself with Vining threshing about the living-room and babbling incoherent agony, shook his old friend with no gentle hand as he demanded:
"Say, you! What is it now? What in blazes got you that time, Anthony? Are you going to have a fit?"