Rising, he jerked the stub of his cigarette through the air-shaft window, and slowly drew on his gauntlets.
"You do what packin' you wanta, kid," he advised Edna, "before three o'clock thisaft'noon. I'll be back for you then. Your train leaves at four. You'll travel along with the mother of this friend of mine—Mrs. Simmons, her name is."
As he had said, the matter was settled. Joan conceded the point without bickering, with indeed a feeling of mean relief. Moreover, she was afraid of Butch....
The flat in Fiftieth Street had gained associations insufferably hateful. She returned to it only long enough to pack up and move out. Incidentally she found, read, and destroyed without answering, a note from Fowey suggesting an assignation. Her paradoxical dislike for the man had deepened into detestation. She both hoped and intended never to see him again.
She moved before nightfall, leaving no address, and established herself in an inexpensive but reputable boarding establishment, little frequented by the class of theatrical people with which she was acquainted, and where a repetition of her escapade was impossible. On the third day following she began rehearsing privately with Gloucester, and threw into the work all she could muster of strength, patience, and intelligence, leaving herself, at the end of each day's work, too exhausted in mind and body to indulge in any of the pleasures to which her tastes inclined.
Fowey, unable to trace her and seeing nothing of the girl in those restaurants and places of amusement she had been wont to frequent, in time gave up the chase; and before the first presentation of "Mrs. Mixer" the newspapers supplied Joan with the news of his clandestine marriage and subsequent flight to Europe with a widow whose fortune doubtless promised compensation for the fact that she had a son nearly as old as her latest husband.
XXXVIII
The rehearsals of "Tomorrow's People" were arranged to begin on the twenty-third day of September; and since all the important rôles had been filled before he left Town, and Wilbrow, whom he could trust, had charge of all other details, Matthias delayed his home-coming until the twenty-second.
Not until the twentieth did he emerge from the wilderness up back of the Allagash country into the comparative civilization of Moosehead Lake. In eight weeks he had not written a line, received a letter, or read a newspaper. But, as he telegraphed Helena from the Mt. Kineo House, he was so healthy that he was ashamed of it.