Mr. Mapleson fairly bubbled over.
"Till she comes back!" he shrilled. "Till she comes back! I tell you she'll never come back. Don't you understand?"
Varick heard in sudden wonder. Before he could speak, though, Mr. Mapleson's voice rose to a shriller, keener pitch.
"I say she'll never come back! You've let her stay up there alone, never going near her, and now that fellow Lloyd wants her. That's why she brought him here—it was for me to see him. She'll marry him before you know it!" Then with a gesture of irrepressible misery and despair Mr. Mapleson seized him by the arm. "What are you going to do?" he demanded.
"I don't know," said Varick, "but I'll tell you this. If anything happens I'll be there with her!"
XII
In that gay world of leisure that lies in and round the throbbing artery of uptown Fifth Avenue, time ordinarily flits by as if on hurrying wings; but with Bab, it happened, the fortnight that followed dragged as if every hour plodded on leaden feet.
April had come, and one afternoon early in the month half-past one had just struck when Hibberd, the Beestons' second man, padding softly up the stairs, knocked on the door of her sitting-room. In his discreet, deferent voice, the tone of the well-trained manservant, he announced, "Luncheon is served, please." Laying down the book in her hand, Bab arose. It would not do to say she had been reading; she hadn't. The thoughts running in her mind left little room for anything else. And in these thoughts there was little to comfort her. What had happened, she began to feel, was exactly what might have been expected. Had she not been warned? How, indeed, could the whole thing have been made plainer than in the way Beeston had put it to her! It was thus, feeding on itself, that the suspicion roused by Beeston's slurs had gone on growing, a condition that certain remembrances of her own had in no way improved.