Two hours later, having turned aside on Broadway to greet an acquaintance, his roving eye fell again on the spruce young man, this time in the act of stepping into a saloon which Larcher had just passed. “By George, this is strange!” he exclaimed.
“What?” asked his acquaintance.
“That's the fifth time I've seen the same man in two days. He's just gone into that saloon.”
“You're being shadowed by the police,” said the other, jokingly. “What crime have you committed?”
The next afternoon, as Larcher stood on the stoop of the house in lower Fifth Avenue, and glanced idly around while waiting for an answer to his ring, he beheld the young man coming down the other side of the avenue. “Now this is too much,” said Larcher to himself, glaring across at the stranger, but instantly feeling rebuked by the innocent good humor that lurked about the stranger's mouth. As the young man came directly opposite, without having apparently noticed Larcher, the latter's attention was called away by the coming of the servant in response to the bell. He entered the house, and, as he awaited the announcement of his name to Miss Kenby, he asked himself whether this haunting of his footsteps might indeed be an intended act. “Do they think I may be in communication with Davenport? and are they having me shadowed? That would be interesting.” But this strange young man looked too intelligent, too refined, too superior in every way, for the trade of a shadowing detective. Besides, a “shadow” would not, as a rule, appear on three successive days in precisely the same clothes and hat.
And yet, when Larcher left the house half an hour later, whom did he see gazing at the display in a publisher's window near by, on the same side of the street, but the young man? Flaring up at this evidence to the probability that he was really being dogged, Larcher walked straight to the young man's side, and stared questioningly at the young man's reflection in the plate glass. The young man glanced around in a casual manner, as at the sudden approach of a newcomer, and then resumed his contemplation of the books in the window. The amiability of the young man's countenance, the quizzical good nature of his dimpled face, disarmed resentment. Feeling somewhat foolish, Larcher feigned an interest in the show of books for a few seconds, and then went his way, leaving the young man before the window. Larcher presently looked back; the young man was still there, still gazing at the books. Apparently he was not taking further note of Larcher's movements. This was the end of Larcher's odd experience; he did not again have reason to suppose himself followed.
The third time Larcher called to see Miss Kenby after this, he had not been seated five minutes when there came a gentle knock at the door. Florence rose and opened it.
“I beg your pardon, Miss Kenby,” said a very masculine, almost husky voice in the hall; “these are the cigars I was speaking of to your father. May I leave them?”
“Oh, come in, come in, Mr. Turl,” called out Miss Kenby's father himself from the fireside.
“Thank you, no; I won't intrude.”