“Anything wrong, sir?” deferentially inquired the chief servitor, noting with apprehension the startled mien of the eminent lecturer.
Mr. Denby tried to compose himself.
“Nothing important,” he managed to reply. “Just some unwelcome tidings from home. I’ll be all right in a moment or two.”
When the head-waiter had bowed himself away Mr. Denby turned to a perusal of the paper. The words which struck his eyes seemed to spell to him the collapse of all things temporal.
The harrowing details which followed were dressed up in such sarcastic verbiage that Mr. Denby’s soul went sick and his appetite for breakfast vanished. He paid his check and sought the seclusion of his room. He wished to hide his face from the public gaze and apply poultices to his wounded dignity.
Jimmy Martin, coming up unannounced, found him a half hour later gazing pensively out of the window—a picture of incarnate misery. Jimmy wasn’t in a particularly jaunty mood himself, but he assumed his best “cheery-oh” manner when he caught a glimpse of his associate’s face.
“What’s the matter, little song-bird?” he inquired breezily. “You look about as lonely as a bartender.”
Mr. Denby turned a pair of ineffably sad eyes on the press agent and sighed mournfully.
“I’m disgraced, Mr. Martin,” he said feebly, “irretrievably disgraced. I should never have gone into this masquerade—never. My saner judgment should have prevailed. I shall never recover from this. I’m the most miserable man in Chicago this morning—the most utterly miserable.”