No. He read it still again, and shook his head at the fender with a despairing groan. The gloom of his reverie benumbed his senses. He let his pipe go out, and suffered the glass at his elbow to remain untouched, as he sat with his sad thoughts for company, and did not even hear the footsteps which presently ascended the stairs.
A soft little knock at the door startled him from his meditations. He stood up, with his heart fluttering, and lifted his hand in wonderment to his brow. Had he been asleep and dreaming?
The dainty tapping on the panel renewed itself. David moved as in a trance toward the door.
CHAPTER IX.
Mosscrop turned the spring-lock noiselessly, and drew the door open with caressing gentleness. His eyes had intuitively prepared themselves to discern the slender form of Vestalia in the dim light of the passage. They beheld instead, with bewildered repulsion, a burly masculine bulk. Wandering upward in angry confusion from the level on which they had expected her dear face, they took in the fatuous, moon-like visage of Lord Drumpipes.
“Dear God!” groaned David, in frank abandonment to disgust.
“I came up quietly this time,” said the Earl. “You made such a row about my being noisy last night, I thought to myself, ‘Now, anything to please Davie! I’ll steal up like a mouse in list-slippers.’”
David scowled angry impatience at him. “Who the deuce cares what you do?” he demanded, roughly. “You might have marched up with a Salvation Army band, for all it matters to me.”