I knew that Dee was still laboring under quite a strain. During dinner she had been very quiet, and now that we had adjourned to the pleasant courtyard on which the dining room opened, where the gentlemen were indulging in coffee and cigars and the rest of us were contenting ourselves with just coffee, she seemed to be nervous and fidgety. Zebedee noticed it, too, and every now and then I caught him watching her with some anxiety.
To catch a young man in the nick of time and keep him from making away with himself is cause for congratulation but not conducive to calmness, when one happens to be only seventeen and not overly calm at that.
"Why don't you tell your father?" I whispered back.
"He'll think I am silly, and then, too, I don't want him to think that I think Louis is likely to repeat his performance. It might give him an idea that Louis is weak and make him lose interest in him. I don't consider him weak, but he is so down in the mouth there is no telling how the thing will work out. Can't you make up some plan? Couldn't we sneak off and go down there? Would you be afraid?"
"Afraid! Me? You know I am not afraid on the street, but I must say that old custard-colored house is some gruesome."
While I was wavering as to whether I could or couldn't go into the deserted hotel at night with no one but Dee, Professor Green proposed that all of us should take a walk down on the Battery.
"There is a wonderful moon rising this minute over there in the ocean and not one soul to welcome it."
So we quickly got into some wraps, as we remembered what a breeze could blow on the Battery, and Dee concealed under her coat her electric flashlight and I put my scissors in my pocket.
"We can shake the crowd and get our business attended to without anyone's being the wiser," I whispered.
A place that is ugly by day can be beautiful by moonlight, and a place that is beautiful by day can be so wonderful by moonlight that it positively hurts like certain strains of the violin in the "Humoresque" or tones of a great contralto's voice. Charleston on that night was like a dream city. We passed old St. Michael's churchyard, where the old cedar bed loomed like a soft, dark shadow among the white tombstones.