"Good night," he said brusquely, vainly striving to bolster his angry feelings.
"Good night, my boy."
Hendrie passed out of the room and closed the door behind him carefully.
As he went Frank flung himself into a chair, and, for a while, sat with his face buried in his hands. Monica was ill. Seriously ill. Maybe dangerously ill. Phyllis had said no word of it in her letters. Not one word, and she was with her. No word had reached him.
He caught his breath. He had suddenly realized how utterly he had cut himself out of Monica's life, the life of this woman who had been as a mother to him.
CHAPTER X
STRIKE TROUBLES SPREADING
It was a sultry afternoon, one of those clammy days when flies stick and become victims of the drink habit, striving to quench unnatural thirst at patches of spilled liquor on bar-room counters, and, in a final frenzy, endeavor to commit suicide in the dregs of warm tumblers left by their human fellow-sufferers.
Lionel K. Sharpe, the proprietor of the Russell Hotel at Everton, was propped behind his counter, smiling with amiable idiocy at the vagaries of two drunken flies scrambling about the inner sides of a tumbler, which contained the dregs of what was alleged to be port wine. Abe Hopkinson, and Josh Taylor, the bullet-headed butcher, watched them from the other side of the bar.