“All gone,” sighed Seth.
At which Lamont, who had been more familiar with the 23d Street Koster & Bial’s, confided to Seth how many corks he himself had added to the ceiling and walls of its famous cork-room back of the scenes.
Enoch swallowed his salad slowly, his ears on the qui vive, his countenance both grim and attentive, and his whole mind on the man with his back to him, who, if he had seen him on entering, had totally forgotten his existence during dinner. Thus another quarter of an hour slipped by, during which Enoch ordered a long cigar and some black coffee. It was not often he dined alone so lavishly, but whatever it cost him to-night, he was determined to sit Lamont out. In his search for him in the club before dinner he had made up his mind to speak to him privately the instant he sighted him. He had ended in listening. That which rankled deep in his heart did not concern Van Worden. He intended to see Lamont alone. If Lamont had a grain of decency in him, he felt he would understand.
“If he doesn’t understand,” he muttered to himself, as he sipped his coffee, “I’ll make him. I’ll explain to him, that his method of winning the confidence of a young girl scarcely out of her teens is nothing short of damnable; that it’s got to stop.”
“Where?” asked Van Worden a moment later, rousing himself and stretching his long, angular body back in his chair, as the two reached their cigars and liqueurs.
“At the Van Cortlandts’,” confided Lamont.
“The devil you say!”
“Telling you the truth, Seth. At one of her deadly musicales. Dearest little piece of flesh and blood you ever laid eyes on—intelligent, too, frightened out of her wits, but I soon attended to that—got her laughing, and played her accompaniments, Tosti’s ‘Good-by,’ and ‘I Awake from Dreams of Thee,’ and all that sort of stuff. Chuck full of sentimentality, with a pair of blue eyes that would keep you awake.”
“How’d she sing?” put in Van Worden.
The shoulders of Lamont’s well-fitting dress coat lifted in a careless shrug.