He stood in the doorway holding a cigar as the taxi drove up, but at that moment his valet, who had followed him as if to close the door, spoke up in a surprised tone.
“I beg your pardon, sir,” he said, “but this was lying on the floor. You stepped over it just now without knowing it. It’s addressed to you, and marked ‘Urgent.’ It’s stamped, but not postmarked—looks as if it had been slipped under the door instead.”
Ex-Senator Phelps took the envelope with a careless air, and no premonition chilled him as he stepped back into the light of the hall and tore it open. As he glanced at the single sheet of paper, however, his face turned ghastly, and he reeled against a small statue that stood on a pedestal, throwing it to the floor and breaking it.
“After all these years!” he muttered hoarsely to himself. Then his eyes fell upon the amazed face of his valet, and, as he crushed the letter in his hand, he made a great effort to pull himself together. “I—I shall not be going out, after all,” he said, in a curiously dead voice. “I’m not—feeling well.”
Every year of the sixty seemed to weigh heavily upon the ex-senator as he pushed open the door of the room on the left. His feet dragged across the thick carpet so that he stumbled, and when he dropped into a chair, buried his face in his hands.
* * * * *
The Forty-second Street Theater had been famous for years as the home of light comedy of the more brilliant sort.
That night was to witness a new production, for which great things were expected—for had the play not been written by one of America’s cleverest and most experienced playwrights, and staged by a production wizard? And was not the star Harold Lumsden?
Already the cheaper parts of the house were packed, and the orchestra was filling up. Here and there a pair of white shoulders gleamed in one of the boxes which would soon be filled—for it was a foregone conclusion that the S.R.O. sign would have to be displayed in the lobby that night.