These phrases--surely nothing in themselves--echoed in his mind with the same unaccountable piquancy and warmth with which they had first come to him over the telephone. He flushed a little, sitting there in the stuffy, bumping, jangling car, as he recalled the way he had involuntarily "played up" to them. He had promised to go to her if he could get away, to telephone her again if he could. That was mere trickery and deceit, a part of the game he was playing; that was all right. But his final whispered "Dearie, good night!" Had that been necessary? He remembered Rockwell's dry comment: "You don't need much prompting!" But his thoughts ran away with him again. Now he was going to see her--to spend a night in her apartment. What would she be like--tall or short, slender like Mollie June or plump like Alicia, fair or dark, with blue eyes or brown or black, curly hair or straight? He could not frame an image that satisfied him as the instrument of that voice.
"Well, what is it to me?" he demanded roughly of himself, suddenly realising the tenor of his meditations. "See here, my boy, you must be careful. She's probably a regular chorus girl--or worse." (But he did not really believe that of her.) "She's nothing whatever to me," he asserted sternly to his truant fancy. "She belongs to--Simpson. And I belong to Mollie June."
The car stopped at last, and Rockwell was getting up.
When they had descended into the street Merriam found that they were at the end of the line by the Lake.
"Illinois Central next," said Rockwell, grinning, and marched them to the Forty-Seventh Street Station of that railway. None of the others spoke.
Their guide bought tickets to the City. "Are we going back to the Loop, then?" thought Merriam.
In a moment they were on the platform. Merriam walked back and forth apart from the others, drawing deep breaths of the Lake air and looking up at the stars, dimly bright in the April night. "I belong to Mollie June," he said firmly to himself.
Presently one of the odd little suburban trains drew up, and they entered.
But they had scarcely sat down and yielded up their tickets when Rockwell routed them out--at Forty-Third Street. Evidently his buying tickets clear to the City had been a part of his elaborate ruse.
Rockwell went at once to a telephone to call up a neighbouring garage.