"Indeed?" Varick remarked.
He sat listening idly, while with a great particularity of detail, as if nothing were too trivial, nothing too insignificant, Miss Hultz related all she had gleaned from the newspaper's account.
"It's to be a dinner dance!" she announced. "You get me, don't you!" Then having let the table grapple with this compelling fact, Miss Hultz leaped to the next illuminating detail. "Covers"—it was the reporter she quoted—"covers will be laid for twenty couples!"
Nor was this all! As Varick sat there, his manner politely attentive but his wits far afield, there sounded dully in his ears all that plethora of sickly, silly inanities with which the society reporter embellishes his spindling effort. "Exclusive! Select! Our Younger Set! Gotham's Upper Tendom!" Bab, little Bab, was to have her dance; and with a growing sorrow at what it signified and in the end must inevitably involve, Varick listened, hardly hearing, while Miss Hultz buoyantly prattled on.
Since the afternoon when she had brought David Lloyd to see Mr. Mapleson, Varick had not heard from Bab, either through the little man or otherwise. Nor had Mr. Mapleson heard either. A fortnight since then had passed; but to the two, in their growing uneasiness, each hour of that time had seemed an age. Nor had Varick's reflections during the fortnight been exactly those of a lover. The condemned awaiting the hour of execution could not have felt more depressed.
It was not only what Bab had said to him, her denunciation, that had swept him off his feet, but it was Mr. Mapleson's revelation about David Lloyd. David a suitor? He had been quick to see what that involved; David, indeed, might be a cripple, but the appeal, the attraction of David's character would go far to obscure the one blemish, his infirmity. Varick knew that. He knew, too, the pity, the compassion, that would warm Bab toward David Lloyd, she with her warm-hearted, impulsive tenderness. He had but a single consolation. That was the thought, the grim reflection, that were ever the fraud found out David's family would at once effectually put an end to any romance. David's father was a perpetual guarantee of that! He let his son marry a nobody—an impostor into the bargain? And there was Beeston too! When Varick thought of him again he smiled grimly, a vision before him of what would happen once Beeston learned the imposture! Yes, but what if Beeston never learned?
Varick was in the midst of this reflection, his brow moist with it, when again Miss Hultz addressed him. About his vis-à-vis there was nothing mean, nothing malicious. Her curiosity for the moment had merely got the better of her. However, that did not in the least alter the awkwardness of the question that Miss Hultz now put to him.
"I say, Mr. Varick," she said. "You're going tonight, of course, ain't you?"
Then, when Varick said no, that he was staying at home, Miss Hultz gave an exclamation.
"Not going?" she ejaculated.