It was only as he went down the steps of The Acacias and out into the gas-lighted street that he remembered that he had not the address to which his relatives had gone.
“But it is to the Langham, of course. They always go there when they have not taken a house in town,” he said to himself, and turned his steps thitherward.
“It is early, thank Heaven, so they will not have retired or gone out,” he thought, as he walked slowly along, pondering over the painful affair, and feeling profoundly sad at the thought of Molly’s treachery.
“Her youth is her only excuse, and yet it seems strange that one so young and seemingly guileless could have conceived and carried out such a clever, wicked plan,” he thought, in wonder, and knowing Cecil’s proud, honest nature as he did he could not feel surprised at the latter’s indignant action in deserting the girl who had thus deceived him.
“But according to Phebe’s description the real Louise Barry can not be one-half as charming as the pretended one,” he said to himself, recalling with some amusement the maid’s spiteful description of the latter as a “yellow-headed, yellow-eyed, deceitful cat.”
His musings brought him at last to the Langham, where he found as he had hoped and expected, his father, mother and brother registered.
He sent up his card, and his father sent down to him to come upstairs to their private parlor, where he found his parents looking pale and dejected as they sat together alone.
CHAPTER XXII.
Molly slept quietly the long night through, under the influence of the doctor’s soothing medicine, and it was far into the morning when she awakened and found her faithful Phebe sitting by her side.
“Well, I thought you were going to sleep all day, Mrs. Laurens,” she exclaimed.