"Crape—on—my—sleeve?" stammered the Stranger. With a dreadful gesture of incredulity he lifted his black-banded arm into vision. It was like watching a live heart torn apart to see his memory waken. "My—God!" he gasped. "My God!" Still wavering but with a really heroic effort to square his stricken shoulders, he swung back toward the company. His face was livid, his voice, barely articulate. Over face and voice lay still that dreadful blight of astonishment. But when he spoke his statement was starkly simple. "I—I buried my wife and unborn child—yesterday," he said. "In a strange land—among strangers I—I——"
More quickly than I could possibly have imagined it, George Keets was on his feet beckoning the Stranger to the place which he himself had just vacated. And with his hands on the Stranger's shoulders he bent down suddenly over him with a curiously twisted little smile.
"Welcome to our—Pity!" said George Keets.
Between Paul Brenswick and his Bride there flashed a sharp glance of terror. It was as though the bride's heart had gasped out. "What if I have to die some day?—And this day was wasted in rain?"
I saw young Kennilworth flush and turn away from that glance. I saw the May Girl open her eyes with a new baffled sort of perplexity.
It was then that Rollins came puttering in, grinning like a Chessy Cat, with his half-demolished breakfast sliding round rather threateningly on his ill-balanced tray. The strange exultancy of rain was in his eye.
"I thought I heard voices," he beamed. "Merry voices!" With mounting excitement he began to beat tunes with his knife and fork upon the delicate porcelain dome of his toast dish. "Am I a—King," he began to intone, "that I should call my own, this—?" Struck suddenly by the somewhat strained expression of Ann Woltor's face, he dropped his knife and fork and fixed his eye upon her for the first time with an unmistakable intentness.
"How did you break your tooth?" beamed Rollins.
CHAPTER II
FOR a single horrid moment everybody's heart seemed to lurch off into space to land only too audibly in a gaspy thud of dismay.