"Not yet," he murmured.
She disguised her feelings and continued to talk chiffons with the woman opposite; but when they mounted to their room and the proprietress looked out of the bureau at them with a greeting, she felt a shade uncomfortable, and hastened her steps.
"I hate that bureau," she said as soon as they had reached the haven of the first landing. "The Garins seem to live in it, and you can't get by without their seeing you! Well, he didn't give it to you, eh?"
"No; it'll be all right to-morrow, though. It's lucky I said 'Thursday' instead of to-day. Has Nurse been to you for anything?"
"Thank goodness, she hasn't! But Baby is bound to be out of something directly. You do think we are sure of it to-morrow, Humphrey, don't you?"
He said there was no doubt about it, and they drew their chairs to the hearth. The night was cold, and presently he went out to a grocer's and spent sixty centimes on a bottle of the kind of red wine that the restaurants threw in with the cheapest meal, smuggling it upstairs under his overcoat. In madame Garin's wine-list it figured as "médoc" at two francs, and she would not have been pleased with him for getting it at a shop. They made it hot over their fire in one of the infant's saucepans; and, sweetened with sugar from the nursery cupboard, they found it comforting. Though their capital was now a son, they were not unhappy, in the prospect of a hundred and seventy-five francs in the course of twenty-four hours, and once Cynthia laughed so I gaily that the nurse came in and intimated that "the rooms opening into one another made the noise very disturbing to Baby."
Kent went to the office next day without a cigarette, for he had smoked his last, and he I awaited his chief's arrival with considerable impatience. The Editor had not been in when he returned to luncheon, but in reply to Cynthia's eager question he assured her that he was certain to have the money in his pocket when he saw her again in the evening. He wanted a cigarette by this time very badly indeed, and when the office clock struck three, he left his desk, and stood pulling his moustache at the window moodily. He began to fear that it was going to be one of the days when Billy Beaufort did not appear in the rue du Quatre Septembre at all.
His misgiving proved to be well founded, and dinner that night was agreeable neither to him nor the girl. She had been reluctant to go down to it, on hearing that madame Garin could not be paid, and, though he persuaded her to go down, she sped past the bureau with averted eyes. It was useless to go in search of Beaufort; the only thing of which one could be positive with regard to his movements at this hour was that he would not be at his hotel; but Kent promised; her to see him before commencing work in the morning, and said that the amount necessary should be sent round to her at once.
Beaufort was staying at the Grand, and he was; still in his room when Kent called there. He was found in bed, reading his letters. A suit of dress-clothes trailed disconsolately across a chair, and by the window a fur-coat and a hat-box had rolled on to the floor. He had not drunk his chocolate, but a tumbler of soda-water and something, and a syphon, stood on the table beside, him, surrounded by his watch and chain, some scattered cigarettes, and the bulk of his correspondence. He looked but half awake and cross.
"What's the matter?" he murmured. "Sit down. There's a seat there, if you move those things. Will you have anything to drink?"