“Sure! She’d know too well what it would do to you on the day you’d want to turn your back on the sporting life. She cried when she went, but she wouldn’t tell me what for: she said I’d know some time to-day. And I do know now. She went to keep you from doing the craziest thing a man of your kind ever does. Some day maybe you’ll know what she’s done for you, and what it cost the poor little soul to do it.”
Philip found his hat and moved toward the door.
“I think I know it now,” he returned half absently; and after he had paid and dismissed the hackman, he went in search of the Jew second-hand man to stop the dismantling of his rooms which had already begun, tearing a small legal document, which he took from his pocket, into tiny squares and scattering them in the street as he hurried along.
Two days later, Reddick, who had dropped into the Curtis Street chop house for a midday bite, found himself seated opposite Bromley.
“Well,” he observed, “it proved to be a false alarm, after all, didn’t it?”
“I suppose it was, if you say so,” replied the play-boy with his good-tempered grin; “only I don’t know what you are talking about.”
“You don’t? Haven’t you seen Phil?”
“Not since day before yesterday when I bade him good-by.”
“Gosh! Then it’s all new to you, is it? He is still here—in his old diggings in the Alamo. It was a flash in the pan—that marriage of his. The girl saved his bacon by skipping out.”
“Um,” said Bromley curiously. “She must have hated him good and hard to run away from half a gold mine.”