But Dan Peterson stood suddenly beside him saying in a quiet voice:
“That will be all this evening, Mr. Massey. Step this way please,” and Eugene found his arm grasped like a vise and himself propelled rapidly out of the room with Nannette in a frightened patter coming behind and some one inside the room shut the door. Afterwards in remembering, it seemed that he had heard a sound something like a chuckle from the region of the bed. It made his blood boil hotly when he thought of it. Of course there had been nothing to laugh at and yet, he felt sure the old Judge had laughed. There must be something—he must find Joyce at once.
They discussed it a long time after they got home and Eugene had got done scolding his wife for having been the cause of Joyce’s leaving. Eugene wanted to get a detective at once and find Joyce. He was frantic. He couldn’t stand the night through with this matter of the house facing him. He even had the telephone in his hand to call up a detective bureau in the city, but Nannette grappled with him for it, and pleaded with him to be reasonable for once.
“Just as soon as you get a detective the whole thing will be out, and everybody will be talking. You’ll have the whole town arrayed against us, and then where will we be? Joyce may come back tomorrow, and then there won’t be any need to tell any one. And anyhow you could have called her back when she first went if you had done what I told you, it was you that scolded her for burning the electric light so late last night you remember.”
“It was you that wore her clothes to the city wasn’t it? It was you that taunted her for being in a menial position! and wouldn’t hear to her going to those examinations that she set so much store by, wasn’t it?”—responded he.
Into the midst of this loud altercation there came a tap on the side door close to which Eugene was sitting. It was so startling for any one to come to that door at that time of night that Eugene jumped and sat up. Both were absolutely still for a quarter of a second. Nannette even turned a little white as she stared toward the door which had four latticed panes of glass and was lightly draped in open fish net.
Nannette recovered first.
“There she is, I suppose,” she said in a low whisper with lips that scarcely moved, for she was conscious that she must be under the eye of whoever was outside. “For pity’s sake don’t rave now and send her off again. And don’t you give in either. She needs a lesson after acting like this.”
She arose and gathered up her hat and wrap which were lying where she had thrown them when she came in from Judge Peterson’s. Her action seemed to bring Eugene to his senses. He got up and went to the door, opening it but a few inches and looking out with an air of affront.
But Joyce was not outside, as he had half made up his mind she would be. A man stood there in the darkness, a stranger he seemed to be at first glimpse, tall, well built, of almost haughty bearing—a thing Eugene could never tolerate in any man but himself. For a moment they stood gazing at one another. It was almost as if the man outside were sizing up the man who stood against the light. Then Eugene remarked acridly: