She gave him a smile. “Are you a knight-errant?”
She hurried away before he could reply—and, though all his yearning nature strove against his man's resolution to do his duty, it could not prevail: he did not follow her as he wanted to—running after her, crying his love. But duty won out by a mere hazard of a margin because her face, as she had shown it to him at the moment of parting, possessed not merely the wonderful beauty which had so impressed him when he had first seen her—it shone with a sudden flash of emotion that glorified it.
He turned away and hurried to the foot of the steps of the Mellicite Club.
He had no time to ponder on the nature of that mystery which he had uncovered in the shabby cottage in Rose Alley nor to wonder what sort of persecution it was that could enlist a mother's aid in that grotesque fashion against her own daughter.
He had not time even to frame a plan of campaign against the man whom the patient waiters in Union Hall were expecting him to capture.
The bell in the tower was booming its nine strokes and the Honorable Archer Converse was coming down the steps from his club, erect, crisp, immaculate, dignified—tapping his cane against the stones.
XVIII
CORRALING A CONVERT
Mr. Converse bestowed only a careless glance at the stranger who was waiting at the foot of the club-house steps.