CHAPTER XXVI
Along in the early spring one night just as Eugene and Nan were about to retire, the telephone bell rang and a man’s voice asked if Mr. Massey was at home, and if he could see some one on important business connected with his cousin Miss Radway.
Eugene was immediately excited, and fairly shouted into the telephone, demanding to know who was speaking.
“That’s all right, pard. I ain’t tellin’ all I know over the wire. Alone now? I’ll drop around. This is absolutely Q. T. you know.”
Nan stood trembling in the doorway, white-faced, frightened.
“You go to bed!” ordered Eugene, trying to still the excitement of his own voice, and getting up to pace the room nervously. “Go to bed, I say!” he roared as Nan still stood in the doorway watching him.
There was a wild look in his eye that made her afraid of him sometimes. He had been hard toward her ever since she falteringly told him of her visit to the minister, and he had looked at her as if she had been a viper and answered her only:
“You FOOL! If you could only learn to keep your mouth shut! Yes, weep. WEEP! That’s your line! Oh, why did I marry a fool?”
Since that day Nan had kept much to herself, had not ventured to take any part in the frantic search for Joyce that was still going on in a stealthy way. Now, at the look in her husband’s eye, she vanished, sobbing softly to herself, went hurriedly up the stairs and flung herself noisily on the bed. A moment later she rose stealthily, removed her shoes and prepared to listen to whatever went on downstairs. Her heart was beating so wildly that she had to put her hand on it, it almost hurt.
Eugene forestalled any attempt on her part to listen by closing the doors of the sitting room, and her only possibility of finding out anything lay in the back staircase or in watching out the window.