Volume Three—Chapter Twenty.
Uncle Luke Turns Prophet.
“Why doesn’t Leslie come?” said Uncle Luke impatiently, as he rose from a nearly untasted breakfast the next morning to go to the window of his private room in the hotel and try to look up and down the street. “It’s too bad of him. Here, what in the world have I done to be condemned to such a life as this?”
“Life?” he exclaimed after a contemptuous stare at the grimy houses across the street. “Life? I don’t call this life! What, an existence! Prison would be preferable.”
He winced as the word prison occurred to him, and began to think of Harry.
“I can’t understand it. Well, he’s clever enough at hiding, but it seems very cowardly to leave his sister in the lurch. Thought she was with me, I hope. Confound it, why don’t Leslie come?”
“Bah! want of pluck!” he cried, after another glance from the window. “Tide must be about right this week, and the bass playing in that eddy off the point. Could have fished there again now. Never seemed to fancy it when I thought poor Harry was drowned off it. Confound poor Harry! He has always been a nuisance. Now, I wonder whether it would be possible to get communication with him unknown to these police?”
He took a walk up and down the room for a few minutes.
“Now that’s where Leslie would be so useful; and he keeps away. Because of Louie, I suppose. Well, what is it? Why have you brought the breakfast back?”