"Why, then, I wash my hands of you," concluded the woman defiantly. "Make your choice, my child," she added with a meaning laugh and moved away, humming a snatch from a French chanson which brought the hot blood to Kirkwood's face.
But the girl did not understand; and he was glad of that. "You may judge between us," he appealed to her directly, once more. "I can only offer you my word of honor as an American gentleman that you shall be landed in England, safe and sound, by the first available steamer—"
"There's no need to say more, Mr. Kirkwood," Dorothy informed him quietly. "I have already decided. I think I begin to understand some things clearly, now.... If you're ready, we will go."
From the window, where she stood, holding the curtains back and staring out, Mrs. Hallam turned with a curling lip.
From the window, Mrs. Hallam turned with a curling lip.
"'The honor of an American gentleman,'" she quoted with a stinging sneer; "I'm sure I wish you comfort of it, child!"
"We must make haste, Miss Calendar," said Kirkwood, ignoring the implication. "Have you a traveling-bag?"
She silently indicated a small valise, closed and strapped, on a table by the bed, and immediately passed out into the hall. Kirkwood took the case containing the gladstone bag in one hand, the girl's valise in the other, and followed.
As he turned the head of the stairs he looked back. Mrs. Hallam was still at the window, her back turned. From her very passiveness he received an impression of something ominous and forbidding; if she had lost a trick or two of the game she played, she still held cards, was not at the end of her resources. She stuck in his imagination for many an hour as a force to be reckoned with.
For the present he understood that she was waiting to apprise Calendar and Mulready of their flight. With the more haste, then, he followed Dorothy down the three flights, through the tiny office, where Madam sat sound asleep at her over-burdened desk, and out.