She did not appear to hear him. Indeed she was not looking at him, and Dan saw Prince Poniotowsky making his way toward their table across the room.
Letty Lane rose. Dan put her cloak about her shoulders, and glancing toward Ruggles and toward the boy as indifferently as she had considered the new-comers, who formed a small group around the brilliant figure of the actress, she nodded good night to both Ruggles and Blair and went up to the Hungarian as though he were her husband, who had come to take her home. However, at the door she sufficiently shook off her mood to smile slightly at Dan:
“I have had ‘lots of fun,’ and the Scotch broth was great! Thank you both so much.”
Until they were up in their sitting-room her hosts did not exchange a word. Then Ruggles took a book up from the table and sat down with his cigar. “I am going to read a little, Dan. Slept all day; feel as wide-awake as an owl.”
Dan showed no desire to be communicative, however, to Ruggles’ disappointment, but he exclaimed abruptly:
“I’ll be darned, Ruggles, if I can guess what you asked her for!”
“Well, it did turn out to be a pretty expensive party for you, Dannie, didn’t it?” Ruggles returned humorously. “I’ll let you off from any more supper parties.”
And Dan fumed as he turned his back. “Expensive! There you are again, Ruggles, with your infernal intrusion of money into everything I do.”
When the older man found himself alone, he read a little and then put his book down to muse. And his meditations were on the tide of life and the beds it runs over; the living whirlpool as Ruggles himself had seen it coursing through London under fog and mist. It seemed now to surge up in the dark to his very windows, and the flow mysteriously passed under his windows in these silent hours when no one can see the muddy, muddy bottom over which the waters go. Out of the sound, as it flowed on, the cries rose, he thought, kindly to his ears: “God bless her—God bless Letty Lane!” And with this sound he closed his meditations, thinking of a more peaceful stream, the brighter, sweeter waters of the boy’s nature, translucent and clear. The vision was happier, and with it Ruggles rose and yawned, and shut his book.