“Won't you tell me what you mean about the garage? Who were those men who attacked you? What happened since I deserted you?”
But Shirley provokingly shook his head, as he drew out his watch.
“It is half-past two. I must hurry down to East Twenty-fifth Street and the East River, at the yacht club mooring, before three. Tomorrow I will give you my version in some quiet restaurant, far from the gadding crowd of the White Light district.”
He rose, drawing back his chair; they walked to the elevator together. The clerk beckoned politely.
“A gent named Mr. Warren telephoned to ask if you were home yet, Miss Marigold. I told him not yet. Was that wrong?”
“It was very kind of you. Thank you so much,” and Helene's smile was the cause of an uneasy flutter in the breast of the blase clerk. “Good-night.”
“That's a lucky guy, at that, Jimmie,” confided the clerk to the bell-boy. “She is some beauty show, ain't she? And she's on the right track, too.”
“Yep, but she's too polite to be a great actress or a star. Her temper'ment ain't mean enough!” responded this Solomon in brass buttons. “I hopes we gits invited to the wedding!”
Outside, Shirley enjoyed the stimulus of the bracing early morning air. A new inspiration seemed to fire him, altogether dissimilar to the glow which he was wont to feel when plunging into a dangerous phase of a professional case. He slowly drew from his pocket the typed note-paper which had nestled in such enviable intimacy with that courageous heart. The faint fragrance of her exquisite flesh clung to it still. He held it to his lips and kissed it. Then he stopped, to turn about and look upward at the tall hostelry behind him. High up below the renaissance cornice he beheld the lights glow forth in the rooms which he knew were Helene's.
As he hurried to the club, he muttered angrily to himself: “I have made one discovery, at least, in this unusual exploit. I find that I have lost what common sense I possessed when I became a Freshman at college!”