Budd had arisen to make his adieux.
“I—ah—feel very much encouraged, Mr. Fenton, by your words. Especially as they don’t condemn me—ah—to a newspaper life,” he said, smiling sarcastically. Then he turned and took Gertrude’s hand.
“I hope, Miss Van Vleck,” he said earnestly, “that you feel encouraged about my redemption.”
Gertrude looked at him with mock solemnity. “I fear, Mr. Budd, that the age of miracles has long gone by.”
Budd strolled thoughtfully along the avenue toward his favorite club. “She is mistaken about the age of miracles,” he was saying to himself. “There are amazing and inexplicable phenomena in sight all around us. A newspaper man who appears to advantage in a drawing-room! Is not that a miracle? And I even suspect that she admires him. It’s most incredible.”
There was a great deal in the world that astonished Napoleon when he reached St. Helena and had time to sit down and think.
* * * * *
“Do you know anything of a man named John Fenton—a journalist, I believe?” asked Buchanan Budd of Percy-Bartlett when he reached the club.
“Yes,” answered the latter. “Fenton belonged to our set years ago—before you entered it, you know. He’s a thoroughbred, but eccentric, and completely out of the running.”
This answer did not tend to restore Budd’s disturbed equilibrium. He suspected that Percy-Bartlett underrated John Fenton’s staying powers.