And Ruggles prayed for some power to unloose his thickening tongue.
“You say she’s gone?” he questioned.
“I say,” said the boy, “that you’ve been meddling in my affairs with the woman I love. I don’t know what you have said to her, but it’s only your age that keeps me from striking you. Don’t you know,” he cried, “that you are spoiling my life? Don’t you know that?” A torrent of feeling coming to his lips, his eyes suffused, the tears rolled down his face. He walked away into his own room, remained there a few moments, and when he came out again he carried in his hand his valise, which he put down with a bang on the table. More calmly, but still in great anger, he said to his father’s friend:
“Now, can you tell me what you’ve done or not?”
“Dan,” said Ruggles with difficulty, “if you will sit down a moment we can—”
The boy laughed in his face. “Sit down!” he cried. “Why, I think you must have lost your reason. I have chartered a motor car out there and the damned thing has burst a tire and they are fixing it up for me. It will be ready in about two minutes and then I am going to follow wherever she has gone. She crossed to Paris, but I can get there before she can even with this damned accident. But, before I go, I want you to tell me what you said.”
“Why,” said Ruggles quietly, “I told her you were poor, and she turned you down.”
His words were faint.
“God!” said the boy under his breath. “That’s the way you think about truth. Lie to a woman to save my precious soul! But I expect,” he said; “you think she is so immoral and so bad that she will hurt me. Well,” he said, with great emphasis, “she has never done anything in her life that comes up to what you’ve done. Never! And nothing has ever hurt me so.”
His lips trembled. “I have lost my respect for you, for my father’s friend, and as far as she is concerned, I don’t care what she marries me for. She has got to marry me, and if she doesn’t”—he had no idea, in his passion, what he was saying or how—“why, I think I’ll kill you first and then blow my own brains out!” And with these mad words he grabbed up his valise and bolted from the room, and Ruggles could hear his running feet tearing down the corridor.