“I met you,” observed Russell Vanbrugh. “I was just coming home—been late down town. I thought you looked rather seedy, but you walked straight enough.”
“Of course I did—being perfectly sober, and only angry. I must have turned into East Fortieth or Thirty-ninth, when I stopped to light a cigar. The waxlight dazzled me, I suppose, for when I went on I fell over something—that street is awfully dark after the avenue—and I hurt my head and my hand. This finger—”
He held up his right hand of which one finger was encased in black silk. Katharine remembered the spot of blood on the letter.
“Then I don’t know what happened to me. Doctor Routh said I had a concussion of the brain and lost the sense of direction, but I lost my senses, anyhow. Have any of you fellows ever had that happen to you? It’s awfully queer?”
“I have,” said Bright. “I know—you’re all right, but you can’t tell where you’re going.”
“Exactly—you can’t tell which is right and which is left. You recognize houses, but don’t know which way to turn to get to your own. I lost myself in New York. I’m glad I’ve had the experience, but I don’t want it again. Do you know where I found myself and got my direction again? Away down in Tompkins Square. It was ten o’clock, and I’d missed a dinner-party, and thought I should just have time to get home and dress, and go to the Assembly. But I wasn’t meant to. I was dazed and queer still, and it had been snowing for hours and I had no overcoat. I found a horse-car going up town and got on. There was nobody else on it but that prize-fighter chap, who turns out to have been Tom Shelton. It was nice and warm in the car, and I must have been pretty well fagged out, for I sat down at the upper end and dropped asleep without telling the conductor to wake me at my street. I never fell asleep in a horse-car before in my life, and didn’t expect to then. I don’t know what happened after that—at least not distinctly. They must have tried to wake me with kicks and screams, or something, for I remember hitting out, and then a struggle, and I was pitched out into the snow by the conductor and the prize-fighter. Of course I jumped up and made for the fighting man, and I remember hearing something about a fair fight, and then a lot of men came running up with lanterns, and I was squaring up to Tom Shelton. I caught him one on the mouth, and I suppose that roused him. I can see that right-hand counter of his coming at me now, but I couldn’t stop it for the life of me—and that was the last I saw, until I opened my eyes in my own room and saw my mother looking at me. She sent for Doctor Routh, and he saw that I wasn’t going to die and went home, leaving everybody considerably relieved. But he wasn’t at all sure that I hadn’t been larking, when he first came, so he took the trouble to make a thorough examination. I wasn’t really hurt much, and though I’d had such a crack from Shelton, and the other one when I tumbled in the dark, I had pretty nearly an hour’s sleep in the horse-car as a set-off. Then my mother brought me things to eat—of course all the servants were in bed, and she’d rung for a messenger in order to send for Routh. And I sat up and wrote a long letter before I went to bed, though it wasn’t easy work, with my hand hurt and my head rather queer. I wish I hadn’t, though—it was more to show that I could, than anything else. There—I think I’ve told you the whole story. I’m sorry I couldn’t make it shorter.”
“It wasn’t at all too long, Jack,” said Katharine, in clear and gentle tones.
She was very white as she turned her face to him. Every one agreed with her, and every one began talking at once. But John did not look at her. He answered some question put to him by the young girl on his left, and at once entered into conversation at that side, without taking any more notice of Katharine than she had taken of him before.
CHAPTER XXX.
The dinner was almost at an end, when John spoke to Katharine again. Every one was laughing and talking at once. The point had been reached at which young people laugh at anything out of sheer good spirits, and Frank Miner had only to open his lips, at his end of the table, to set the clear voices ringing; while at the other, Teddy Van De Water, whose conversational powers were not brilliant, but who possessed considerable power over his fresh, thin, plain young face, excited undeserved applause by putting up his eyeglass every other minute, staring solemnly at John as the hero of the evening, and then dropping it with a ridiculous little smirk, supposed to be expressive of admiration and respect.