"Oh, I don't mean money!" Kenwick cried hotly. "I know you have that!"
"I don't mean money, either." He forced his gaze back to his host. And then that sixth sense which is in the soul of every creative artist awoke in Kenwick's being and made his eyes luminous with understanding.
Jarvis picked up his hat from the chair into which it had dropped. "I'm going out to the Paddingtons' for dinner," he said casually. "I'll have about——" He snapped open the cover of his watch, then closed it again. "The most devilish thing about life on this planet, Kenwick, is that we can't do very much for each other. The game is largely solitaire. But for any good that I ever did I've been well repaid. Any man ought to be satisfied, I think, when the gods allow him two full hours—in Utopia."
CHAPTER XX
It was the morning after his acquittal that Kenwick and Marcreta Morgan drove out of the Paddington gateway in one of the Utopia machines. They turned to the left and took the stretch of perfect asphalt road that led to the old Raeburn house.
The mystery of its destruction had never been explained. Richard Glover, and every one else who was connected with the case of Ralph Regan, had proved a satisfactory alibi. The owner of Rest Hollow had been notified by wire of its destruction and he had replied with orders that the grounds were to be kept locked and admission denied to all callers. It had undoubtedly been one of the handsomest homes in a community of handsome homes, but since the first days of its existence fate had destined it for tragedy. And perhaps its owner was relieved to know that only a pile of whitening ashes marked the grave of his own romance and the prison of another man's hope. At all events, the mystery of its passing never has been solved, and conjecture concerning it is still a favorite topic around the tea-tables of Mont-Mer's fashionable suburban district.
"But I want to see it in ruins," Kenwick had told Marcreta after their first radiant hour together. "I want to know that it is really gone off the face of the earth, so that when it comes to me in memory I can assure myself that it is only a dream."
They turned the last corner and came suddenly in sight of the tall iron gate. Across it a sinister chain swung ominously, warning the world away from communication with that most dreadful affliction that can befall a human soul. The ruins of Rest Hollow loomed somber and shapeless before them, and Roger Kenwick brought his car to a stop in the very spot where Arnold Rogers had once halted, hesitated, and then gone on his way. Guarding the pile like a battered but relentless sentinel was the tall, charred chimney of the dining-room. As he looked at it, Kenwick's hand sought instinctively for that of the woman beside him, as though to assure himself of her reality. And then he heard himself ask the question that for so long had beaten against his brain.
"How could you do it? How could you send me away that night, dear, into the horrors of war and—this, without hope?"