The young reporter bounded into the room and stopped short. He could have sworn he'd seen the redhead when he'd first thrown the door open, but now she didn't seem to be there at all. He searched the room systematically and finally decided the girl had only been a trick of the imagination. Settling for second best, he turned his attention to Marc.
He looked at the unconscious man and frowned. There was something odd in the way the fellow's lips kept moving. Also, something odd in his expression. He seemed to be holding a whispered conversation with someone. The reporter dropped to his knees and lowered his ear to Marc's murmuring lips.
"No, no," Marc was saying. "No, Toffee! Stop wrapping your arms around my neck like that. What are you trying to do, throttle me? Can't we say good-bye without all that?" Then he made a strange whooshing noise as though a fist had been jabbed into the pit of his stomach. For a moment his expression was angered, then it slowly relaxed. "Goodbye," he whispered. "Goodbye."
The reporter sat up, deeply perplexed. If he had been expecting to overhear an inadvertent confession, he was sadly mistaken. He wasn't quite sure just what he had heard. It didn't seem to make sense.
It might have made a great deal of sense, however, if the reporter had only known of the valley of Marc's mind and the blue mists from which Toffee had come, and to which she was returning. If the young man had only known of these things, he might easily have written the most startling story of the year. As it was, though, he only shook his head, got to his feet, and went in search of water with which to revive Marc.
It was an apprehensive Marc that left the elevator and made his way slowly toward apartment 17-B. Since the sudden departures of George and Toffee a sobering reaction had set in and certain salient facts, relative to his financial and domestic status, had made themselves hatefully apparent. That George had managed to guide the courtroom fiasco to a satisfactory conclusion hadn't really resolved any problems other than those that he, George, had created himself. Otherwise, everything was just as unsettled as before. Probably more, by now. Marc sighed heavily and proceeded to the apartment door, where his ring was quickly answered by the diminutive maid, Marie.
Marie's distress was ill concealed. "Madam is most wretched," she said. "She awakened only a bit ago, and the papers seem to have upset her terribly. I took some breakfast to her, but.... Perhaps if you went to her now...."
Marc left Marie wringing her hands in the hallway. He knocked lightly on Julie's door and when he received no answer, went on in.