“It’s a rule of the Department,” she explained severely.
That evening Burton returned to New York without having obtained any more explicit directions than those given by Aunt Amanda. But he was not hopeless. Surely, he assured himself, it would not be difficult to discover the whereabouts of the Colonel and his niece so long as hotel registers were open to public inspection.
But at the end of two days he had changed his mind. At the end of the third he gave up the search. New York had swallowed the Princess and the Ogre! Burton returned to his affairs, which had begun to suffer, and strove, for their good, to banish thoughts of Belle Harbour and the Enchanted Garden and Kitty of the Roses from his mind. But the task he had set himself was a difficult one; and just when it seemed that he was arriving at some degree of success, lo! a prankish Fate interposed.
It was well into July. New York had been sweltering all day under hot, cloudless skies, and even the darkness brought no relief. To stay indoors was out of the question, and so Burton dragged himself from an already deserted club after a late dinner and hailed a hansom.
“Drive around,” he directed,—“any old place so long as it’s cool.”
Cabby turned the horse’s head up-town and it trotted listlessly along over the still heated asphalt. Burton leaned forward to catch what air there was and smoked and meditated. For some reason—perhaps it was a glimpse of a florist’s window that did it—his thoughts flew southward to a garden of roses and to a small, graceful figure that walked therein. Fagged by the heat of the long day, he had no strength left with which to combat temptation, and he yielded. It came back to him very vividly; closing his eyes he saw the garden and the blank, drowsy old house; he saw the door beside the rose-vines open and a white-gowned figure trip down the steps. She came nearer and nearer, smiling, happy-eyed, the broad brim of her hat lifting in the breeze and chasing the edge of the mellow shadow over her cheek. Never before had her face come back to him so clearly. In the length of eight blocks he lived over those precious mornings minute by minute. In the middle of the ninth he was suffering all the torments of a despairing lover of twenty. He hurled the dead cigar from his lips to the pavement and thrust up the trap with his cane.
