“Oh, it isn't the police I'm afraid of,” said Polly, tossing her head.
“What then?”
“Never mind, my dear,” said Polly.
On the way downstairs she reproached herself for not seeing what was coming. “But girls like us never do, now do we?”
Glory coloured up to her hair, but made no protest. At the gate Polly wiped her eyes and drew down her veil, and said: “I'm sorry to say it to your face, my dear, but it's all been that Mr. Drake's doings, and a girl ought to know he'd do as much himself, and worse. But you're a great woman now, and in everybody's mouth, so you needn't care. Only——”
Glory's face was scarlet and her under lip was bleeding. Yet she kissed the poor shallow thing at parting, because she was down, and did not understand, and lived in another world entirely. But going back to where her letter lay unfinished she thought: “Impossible! If this girl, living in an atmosphere so different, thinks that——” Then she sat at the table and forced herself to tell all.
She had got through the red riot of her confession and was writing: “I don't know what he would think of it, but do you know I thought I saw his face on Wednesday night. It was in the dark, and I was in a cab driving away from the stage door. But so changed! oh, so changed! It must have been a dream, and it was the same as if his ghost had passed me.”
Then she became aware of voices in dispute downstairs. First a man's voice, then the voices of two men—one of them Koenig's, the other with a haunting ring in it. She got up from the table and went to the door of her room, going on tip-toe, yet hardly knowing why. Koenig was saying: “No, sair, de lady does not lif here.” Then a deep, strong chest-voice answered, “Mr. Koenig, surely you remember me?” and Glory's heart seemed to beat like a watch. “No-o, sair. Are you—Oh, yes; what am I thinking of?—But de lady——”
“Mr. Koenig,” Glory called, cried, gasped over the stair-rail, “ask the gentleman to come up, please.”
She hardly knew what happened next, only that Koenig seemed to be muttering confused explanations below, and that she was back in her sitting-room giving a glance into the looking-glass and doing something with her hair. Then there was a step on the stairs, on the landing, at the threshold, and she fell back a few paces from the door, that she might see him as he came in. He knocked. Her heart was beating so violently that she had to keep her hand over it. “Who's there?”