But the loftiness was as unreal as Mrs. Beamish. Inwardly she jubilated, wondering how much she would get. A hundred? In that case she could repay Lennox at once. At the thought of it, again she revised her opinion. Paliser was young and in her judgment all young men were insects. On the other hand he was serviceable. Moreover, though he looked cocky, he did not presume. He talked rot, but he did not argue. Then, too, his car was a relief.
But now the car, after bolting through the Park and flying along the Riverside, had swerved. It was mounting the upper reaches of the longest highway on the planet. There it swerved again. From Broadway it barked loudly into a side-street where easily, with a soapy slide, it stopped.
Paliser got out, preceded Cassy to the steps of the walk-up and smiled in her face. "When?"
Cassy, the revised opinion of him about her, gave him her hand. "Ask the telephone."
The hall took her. She was scaling the stairs. On the way Mrs. Beamish accompanied her. She wished she could tell her father. Yet, if she told him, how could she account for what she did with the money? And would it be a hundred? Perhaps fifty, perhaps less.
But Paliser saw to it that Mrs. Beamish behaved properly. On the morrow Ma Tamby dumped in Cassy's astonished lap two hundred and fifty—less ten per cent., business is business—for samples of the bel canto which Mrs. Beamish was not to hear, and for an excellent reason, there was no such person.
XI
Mrs. Austen looked at Lennox, who had been looking at her, but who was then looking at the rug, in the border of which were arabesques. He did not see them. The rug was not there. The room itself had disappeared. The nymph, the dial, the furniture, the decorations and costly futilities with which the room was cluttered, all these had gone. Mrs. Austen had ceased to be. In that pleasant room, in the presence of this agreeable woman, Lennox was absolutely alone, as, in any great crisis of the emotions, we all are.
Of one thing he was conscious. He was suffering atrociously. Pain blanketed him. But though the blanket had the poignancy of thin knives, he kept telling himself that it was all unreal.