He found a taxicab, and as it drew up at the curb before the hotel he saw the Cardew car moving away. It gave him his first real breath for twenty minutes. Lily was not there.
But Louis Akers was. He got his room number from a clerk and went up, still determinedly holding on to himself. Afterwards he had no clear recollection of any interval between the Benedict and the moment he found himself standing outside a door on an upper floor of the Saint Elmo. From that time on it was as clear as crystal, his own sudden calm, the overturning of a chair inside, a man's voice, slightly raised, which he recognized, and then the thin crash of a wineglass dropped or thrown to the floor.
He opened the door and went in.
In the center of the sitting room a table was set, and on it the remains of a dinner for two. Akers was standing by the table, his chair overturned behind him, a splintered glass at his feet, staring angrily at the window. Even then Willy Cameron saw that he had had too much to drink, and that he was in an ugly mood. He was in dinner clothes, but with his bruised face and scowling brows he looked a sinister imitation of a gentleman.
By the window, her back to the room, was Lily.
Neither of them glanced at the door. Evidently the waiter had been moving in and out, and Akers considered him as little as he would a dog.
“Come and sit down,” he said angrily. “I've quit drinking, I tell you. Good God, just because I've had a little wine—and I had the hell of a time getting it—you won't eat and won't talk. Come here.”
“I'm not hungry.”
“Come here.”
“Stay where you are, Lily,” said Willy Cameron, from inside the closed door. “Or perhaps you'd better get your wraps. I came to take you home.”