“It is very good of you,” he said, taking her outstretched hand. “How much pleasure your invitation gives me I dare not tell you—for fear of taking a liberty.”
She smiled merrily at his little shaft of sarcasm, and he left her with the roguish light still dancing in her eyes.
She turned and walked across the drawing-room and wandered aimlessly into the library. Soon she found herself seated at the piano, but there was no comfort there. For the first time within her recollection her bosom friend, her confidante, the sharer of her joys and sorrows, had turned false.
Throwing herself down upon a divan, she buried her head in the pillows and sobbed bitterly.
CHAPTER V.
“One robbery does not justify another.”
So said Richard Stoughton to John Fenton as they sat at dinner in the restaurant of the Astor House, while the wind and the snow played tag up and down Broadway, and men compared the blizzard of ’88 with the storm that was then raging, and incidentally wondered how the star-eyed goddess of Reform enjoyed cleaning the streets.
It was Friday evening, and Richard was hurrying his dinner that he might reach his rooms in time to dress for the opera. He and Fenton had just come from a visit to a tenement house not far from the famous hotel in which they were seated, and their conversation had naturally turned upon the great problem suggested by the sights they had witnessed.
“Come with me,” Fenton had said to the younger man an hour before. “I want to show you a picture that will make a striking contrast to the scene you will witness at the Metropolitan to-night.”