While dressing I percieved that my chest and arms were covered with small red dots, but I had no time to think of myself. I sliped downstairs and outside the drawing room I heard mother conversing in a loud and angry tone with a visitor. I glansed in, and ye gods!
It was the Adventuress.
Drawing somwhat back, I listened. Oh, Dairy, what a revalation!
“But I must see her,” she was saying. “Time is flying. In a half hour the performance begins, and—he cannot be found.”
“I can’t understand,” mother said, in a stiff maner. “What can my daughter Barbara know about him?”
The Adventuress snifed. “Humph!” she said. “She knows, all right. And I’d like to see her in a hurry, if she is in the house.”
“Certainly she is in the house,” said mother.
“Are you sure of that? Because I have every reason to beleive she has run away with him. She has been hanging around him all week, and only yesterday afternoon I found them together. She had some sort of a Skeme, he said afterwards, and he wrinkled a coat under his mattress last night. He said it was to look as if he had slept in it. I know nothing further of your daughter’s Skeme. But I know he went out to meet her. He has not been seen since. His manager has hunted for to hours.”
“Just a moment,” said mother, in a fridgid tone. “Am I to understand that this—this Mr. Egleston is——”
“He is my Husband.”