"Hours have I waited and waited at your rooms! There the young Ingham sends me word that you are here. We have hoped always you might be with her! Oh, dear heaven! You know nothing, young sir? Nothing at all?"
"Nothing."
She drew back. "Tell me only this. Are you—for her, Mr. Herrick? Or rid of her?"
Herrick replied, "Well, what do you think?"
She, whom grief somehow became and illumined like her native and revealing element, peered into his haggard face, worn and soiled and sharpened and grim. "Then, young gentleman, I am asked by Mrs. Hope if of her daughter you have any word or trace, do not give it to the police."
What? Herrick felt something cold breaking about the roots of his hair. Then this clinging, this devoted mother did not want her daughter found!—"She said nothing more than this?"
"Nothing more."
He digested it in silence and it was with a heavy gathering dread that when she asked him to drive home with her he put himself in her hands. Then, in what seemed a single convulsion of the storm, the taxi rocked to a standstill before the Deutch apartment.
As Mrs. Deutch sprung on the light their eyes vainly quested for some envelope beneath the door; she went out again to the mail-box, to the elevator, inquiring for a message. Then the woman and the young man, not knowing where to turn next, sat down amid the emptiness of those walls which had so often held Christina. Here, more than ever, everything said, "She must be just round the corner! Where is she? Where can she be?" And still Herrick knew that Mrs. Hope's message was but a part of what he had to hear and that his hostess still groped for terms in which to tell the rest.
The pause lay heavy between them. Then, "Young gentleman," said Mrs. Deutch, "you love my Christina, is it not so?"