"Oh, of a surety!"
"And this was all?"
"All!"
Herrick found himself listening with a strange excitement. He could not have told why he had a sudden sense of having touched a spring. That brief revelation of rash love—what was there in that? Such a thing might loom large in a society novel; in the vast, mixed, multitudinous life of men and women it was small enough. How could it arrest his attention at a time like this? As though some small, mysterious, irrelevant key had been slipped into his hand! By the fleeing figure of Mrs. Hope? That amiable, vacant, and correct lady, how could any young and long-dead folly of hers, reaching across a generation, strike down Ingham and shatter a little world? "The little pitted speck"—What was that? What was he remembering now? "The wages of sin are more sinning!" Why, that was the motto he had taken for his novel? Sin? Nonsense! "The little pitted speck in garnered fruit that, rotting inward,—"
He woke himself roughly to hear Mrs. Deutch adding, "But they lived with that hard woman, she and her mother, in poverty. And to have it nagged at and flaunted at the mother, it made her a morbid child. No more. But now, sir, the Italians?"
"The Italians, indeed! Mrs. Deutch, as you owe them such a grief, as you believe in justice and the protection of the weak, as you have had enough of government by the triangular knife, give me the name of your Christina's Italian host!"
CHAPTER III
SEARCH-LIGHTS FLASHED IN THE EYES: KANE'S STORY
"Well, for one thing," Kane said, "no mortal creature ever looked at that girl and thought her a quitter." He was standing at Ingham's table, wrinkling his eyebrows at the storied blind. "I've come within the fascinations of that young person myself, but I don't think it's infatuation which makes me say that she didn't drop down in a dead faint yesterday afternoon, just to pass the time. When those clear eyes of hers looked at that lock of hair she learned something that astonished and horrified her. From that moment she made up her mind to go somewhere and, at the appointed hour, go she did. Devil take her for not confiding in Mrs. Deutch! She meant, I daresay, to return. But she must have been greeted with the news of the moving picture advertisement and thought herself very well off where she was. Eventually, she'll pull some string from there."