The Pretty Lady's voice took on a sudden hurt, left-out resentment. "Of course," she hurried on, "he wasn't exactly sad to go—nothing could make him sad. But I know that it must have made him very mad. He had just bought a new automobile. And he had rented a summer place at Marblehead. And he wanted to play tennis in June—"
She paused for an instant's breath, and Alrik crashed like a moose into the silence.
"It was lung trouble!" he attested vehemently. "Cough, cough, cough, all the time. It came on specially worse in April, and she died in May. She wasn't never very strong, you know, but she'd been brought up in your wicked old steam-heated New York, and she would persist in wearing tissue-paper clothes right through our rotten icy winters up here. And when I tried to dose her like the doctor said, with cod-liver oil or any of them thick things, I couldn't fool her—she just up an' said it was nothin' but liquid flannel, and spit it out and sassed me. And Gruff—Growly-Dog-Gruff," he finished hastily, "I don't know what ailed him. He jus' kind of followed along about June."
The Partridge Hunter drew a long, heavy breath. When he spoke at last, his voice sounded like the voice of a man who holds his hat in his hand, and the puffs of smoke from his pipe made a sort of little halo round his words.
"Isn't it nice," he mused, "to think that while we four are cozying here to-night in the same jolly old haunts, perhaps they three—Man, Girl, and Dog—are cuddling off together somewhere in the big, spooky Unknown, in the shade of a cloud, or the shine of a star—talking—perhaps—about—us?"
The whimsical comfort of the thought pleased me. I did not want any one to be alone on such a night.
But Alrick's tilted chair came crashing down on the floor with a resounding whack. His eyes were blazing.
"She ain't with him!" he cried. "She ain't, she ain't, she A-I-N-'T! I won't have it. Why, it's the middle of the night!"
And in that electric instant I saw the Pretty Lady's face set rigidly, all except her mouth, which twisted in my direction.
"I'll wager she is with him," she whispered under her breath. "She always did tag him wherever he went!"