Alice Bradley stopped before them, an open letter in one hand, a bank check in the other. She was very pale and looked frightened.
“Mr. Fenway, they tell me at the office that Miss Barnhelm left the hotel over an hour ago. Do you know where she has gone?”
“Why do you ask?” demanded Mrs. Harlan, with a sudden flash of understanding.
“See!” Alice held out the check and the letter. “My father has left me! This letter was brought by a messenger. He says he was called away on business, and for me to remain here with my aunt, who arrives to-night. That woman has taken him away from me! My father—who has always been so good to me—taken him away from me; do you hear?”
“Telegram for you, Mr. Fenway.” A bell-boy came up to Dick, holding out a telegram. “Just came, sir.”
“It’s all right!” Dick sprang up and, seeing the envelope, tore it open. “She wouldn’t leave me without a word! I knew she wouldn’t. She has gone, yes, but she’s wired me where to join her!” He opened the message and read it at a glance, then without a word, but with a look on his face that brought the tears to soft-hearted Mrs. Harlan’s eyes, he handed her the message and turned and left them. She read it aloud. It was from his lawyer in Cleveland, and read, “Divorce arranged. Congratulations.”
CHAPTER XVIII
ONCE MORE IN NEW YORK
Dr. Crossett was finding it a difficult matter to keep from falling to sleep. The dinner had been stupid, even for a formal affair of this sort, where one scarcely expects to be entertained. He had worked hard all day at the hospital, and after making a brief speech introducing the guest of honor of the evening, he sat with his chair pushed back from the disordered dinner table and resigned himself to his fate. A man could hardly be talked to death in two hours, he thought, and after all there was hope; perhaps the half hour of informal conversation that always followed the speech-making might be less deadly than usual. What a fool he was to give his time to these riots of platitude; he swore softly to himself as he looked through the haze of tobacco smoke at the faces of many of the foremost medical and psychological authorities of France, and, as he always did upon occasions of this kind, laid elaborate plans for immediately resigning from the society. He had in fact almost finished a mental draft of his letter of resignation, when the sound of a hundred voices blending into a confused babel of conversation warned him that the formal speech-making was over.
“Thank God for that,” he exclaimed in English, turning to his right-hand neighbor, an American psychologist named Miller, whom he had met for the first time that evening.