"You know I am on new ground, old chap, but—but how about asking Miss Lindsey, too?" Mr. Farraday questioned, with great diffidence.
"Fine!" agreed Mr. Vandeford, with accelerated glow under his ribs that Miss Lindsey had been proposed when Miss Hawtry might have been invited. "Get to bed, can't you, you Indian, you? Night!"
"Good-night!" answered Mr. Farraday, as he departed to his own room.
And still Mr. Vandeford did not sleep.
Flat upon his back he lay and faced, analyzed, and card-indexed his situation and himself.
"Five years of myself given to that gutter girl and I never even cared; let her annex me for purposes of parade and publicity, and thought it funny sport. Wasted? Something to be deducted for pleasure in artistic success of "Dear Geraldine," but what will it cost me if I have to stand by and see her make old Denny hate himself as I do myself, or worse? She'll not stop short with him, and how do I know what he'll do? The money don't matter, but the—cleanliness does. If I go in to save him, she gave me notice to-night that she would go for that gray-eyed girl. What can she do to her? First, kill her play, no matter what I do to build up a success for the kiddie to cancel that mortgage. Second: do something, say something that will kill that look in those gray eyes when they lift to me. Never! Take Denny, Violet, and the Lord help him; I can't. You've bought me. Washing her hair in the Y. W. C. A.! God bless that institution and—"
At last Mr. Godfrey Vandeford slept.
After his ten o'clock awakening Mr. Vandeford displayed a marked eccentricity in his demeanor. That morning was unlike any morning he had ever experienced, and his conduct surprised himself. A daybreak shower had fallen on the hot and baked city, and it was as fresh as a suburb. Arrayed in the coolest of white silk, linen, and suede, Mr. Vandeford had his chauffeur drive him not to the whirling office but to the most sophisticated Fifth Avenue florist, where he purchased the most unsophisticated bunch of flowers at the highest price to be obtained in New York.
"The Young Women's Christian Association," he commanded the obsequious young Valentine who drove the big Chambers. Mr. Vandeford was never sufficiently unoccupied of mind to pilot a car in and out of New York traffic. For half a second the young Frenchman hesitated.
"I don't know where it is—Find out," commanded Mr. Vandeford, and again he had the foreign experience of feeling the blood burn the under side of the tan on his cheeks.