III
Meanwhile, her cheeks aflame, furiously self-conscious at what she had revealed, Barbara Wynne had gone flying up the stairway to her room. There, half an hour later, tapping softly at her door, Mr. Mapleson found her lying in the dark, her face buried among the pillows of her bed.
"Why, Babbie!" he whispered—"Babbie Wynne!"
The boarders at Mrs. Tilney's, and especially those who had heard the story of Barbara Wynne, often commented on Mr. Mapleson's devotion to the landlady's little ward. The fact is the two had long lived together in the boarding house; for the year that Mr. Mapleson came to Mrs. Tilney's was the year Barbara Wynne had come there too. However, that was but a coincidence. They were in no way related. Mr. Mapleson, it seemed, had come first.
That night, now nearly seventeen years ago, nine o'clock had just struck when Mrs. Tilney's doorbell sounded. As the day happened to be a Sunday, and therefore the upstairs girl's evening out, Mrs. Tilney herself had answered.
The night was withering. It was the evening of an August dog day, ghastly betwixt the horrors of its heat and its stagnant, glaring sunshine, yet the man she found in the vestibule was clad in a winter suit not only sizes too large for him but suffocating in its armorlike thickness. Dust powdered him from head to foot. It powdered also the cheap suitcase he had set down beside him.
"Well?" Mrs. Tilney had inquired sharply.
A perfect convulsion of embarrassment had for a moment kept the slight, pallid man from replying. "I—why, your sign outside," he'd faltered then; "if you could let me have a room."
"You have references?" Mrs. Tilney had demanded.