“There he is now!”
“Who? D’Arcy?”
“Yes, with the Helley-Quetgens, in that box between the columns. Isn’t that your friend Leilah whom he is talking to? By Jove, it is, and Barouffski is there, also.”
Violet, who had also been promenading her glass, put it down.
“Well, he ought to be. I do think she has acted scandalously. What is said at the club?”
“About Verplank? It is forgotten already. Barouffski, you know, claimed that it was a mistake, and as it appears that Verplank agreed with him, as from neither the one nor the other any charge was forthcoming, the police could do nothing but get Verplank back to the Ritz.”
Impatiently Violet unfurled her fan.
“Yes, where she has been every day; every day, that is, when she has not been with d’Arcy.”
The statement was inexact. Leilah had indeed been at the Ritz but d’Arcy she had seen but once, momentarily, by accident—if there be such a thing, in any event through one of those seeming hazards which, however fortuitous at first, afterward appear to have been designed. It was a little, though, before Leilah took that view of things. Meanwhile, when, on recovering from her swoon, she learned that Verplank had also recovered she realised with thanksgiving that Destiny which has its tyrannies has its mercies as well. So soon then as she could get from the bed into which the horrors of the midspring nightmare had thrown her, she went to the Ritz where she found Verplank amply attended, abundantly bandaged, severely but not dangerously hurt.