She lay in the window-seat till daybreak, dreaming, staring at the stars.
CHAPTER XVI
AN ABRUPT ENDING
Nan sang as she dressed the next morning. The gods had ordained that she shouldn’t marry Billy, and after her uncertainties on that point she was relieved to find that the higher powers had taken the troublesome business out of her hands. She was surprised at her light-hearted acceptance of the situation. She hadn’t married Billy and she sang in the joy of her freedom.
Just as she was ready to leave her room the maid brought up a special delivery letter from Copeland. It had been posted at six o’clock. She tore open the envelope and read frowningly:—
Dear Nan:—
Sorry about the row at the church last night. Never occurred to me that there’d be such a jam. I hung around the neighborhood as long as I could, hoping to find you. But it will be nicer, after all, to make the run by daylight. Telephone me where we can meet this morning, say at ten. I shall be at the office early and shall expect to hear from you by nine-thirty. For God’s sake, don’t fail me, Nan!
This was scrawled in pencil on Hamilton Club paper. She propped it against her dressing-table mirror and stared at it wonderingly. It did not seem possible that she had ever contemplated running away with Billy. The remembrance of him as he sat in his car, quarreling with the police, with the eyes of a hundred people upon him, sickened her.
Either you love me, Nan, or you don’t; you either have been fooling me all along or you mean to stand by me now and make me the happiest man alive....
She smiled at Billy’s efforts to be pathetic—a quizzical little smile. The paper smelt odiously of tobacco smoke. She tore the note to pieces and let them slip slowly from her hand into her waste-basket. No; she did not love Billy. Only a few hours earlier she had been ready to run away with him; but that was all over now. She was sorry for Billy, but she did not love him. How could she have ever been foolish enough to think she did! But why, she wondered, was she forever yielding to impulses from which a kind fate might not always protect her? “You little fool!” she ejaculated. A moment later she stood smiling in Farley’s door.
“Nan, look here what they say about you in the paper!” he said, glancing at her over his spectacles. “I told Eaton not to blab about that swimmin’-tank business and here they’ve got us all in the paper!”