“I am sorry to say that the girl is unworthy of sympathy. I confess I was once sadly smitten with her charms, and when it leaked out that she had left her old home, I would not have believed any one who had dared tell me there was any guilty motive for her flight. I had my eyes opened to the truth in a very short time, however.
“You know Broughton, do you not? Yes, I mean Charley Broughton; well, what will you say of Miss Iris when I tell you that I found her at the house in Lexington Avenue. Ah, you wince, my friend; probably the mention of this house recalls the memory of many bright dollars lost inside its walls.
“Well, it was there I came upon Miss Iris, talking confidentially with Broughton, in that gentleman’s own private rooms.
“I was shocked beyond power of expression, and very nearly succeeded in incurring my host’s enmity by a too evident betrayal of my feelings on the subject. A couple of days after the encounter I fell across St. John at the club, and told him where I had seen the girl every one fancied him in love with. I know you think it was unmanly of me, but you see I owed St. John an old grudge, and I think I paid it then, in full.
“He looked like a dead man for a moment, and I could see him shiver as if some one had struck him a heavy blow; but he could not have taken the matter so much to heart as I believed at the time, or society would not to-day be canvassing the probability of his early marriage with Isabel Hilton.”
At this moment another gentleman joined the speakers, and the subject of St. John and his loves was dropped for the time.
It would be a task beyond our feeble powers to describe the feelings of Iris at the time.
She made no sound, nor gave any outward sign of the torture she was enduring, nor did she give herself entirely up to the deadly weakness that was creeping over her.
She remembered Madam Ward’s check, and watched her opportunity to present it.
This accomplished, she left the bank building with slow and faltering steps, having first concealed the money in her bosom with a vague fear that she would not long have her senses, or the power to take care of it.