Neither he nor Herrick had ever been strong enough to deny themselves the foolish headlines where one hour Christina had been seen as a passenger for Hongkong and another as a chambermaid in Yonkers. Nancy's ill-treated locket had roused the public to frenzy, but its imagination had definite items only of the eclipsing Christina Hope who, in the mid-day editions, generally lapsed to a lunatic in a suburban sanitarium; but nightfall always saw her mount again to the ghastliest and most criminal of "bodies." It was some such horror upon which Stanley had now fallen; below it Herrick saw the statement that in a day or two Denny would come up for sentence before Judge Fletcher.
He had little enough love for Will Denny, but it was with a feeling of nausea that he observed the mounting satisfaction of Ten Euyck. After four years the law was to wipe out, for its most obedient son, a blow across the mouth! It was, nevertheless, the poisoned rumor of Christina which had set the air afire between all three men. This dealt with some lovely fugitive hunted out that day by wireless and then disappearing from a steamer in mid-ocean. The languor of an incredible fatigue stole feverishly through Herrick's veins. Ten Euyck shouted to Stanley in a kind of bark, "Well, no waves can hold her down!" And he began to hum a tune in defiance of the faith with which Herrick's silence defied the printed words. Herrick looked up and their gaze met across the screaming columns. Ten Euyck's tune was, "Come rest in this bosom, my own stricken deer." Herrick knocked the newspaper out of his hand and there was a second's tense fury before these two, who had forgotten everything else, should leap at each other. In that second Stanley, lifting his eyes, whistled excitedly and caught Herrick's arm.
They were standing at the corner of Long Acre where five nights ago Herrick had met Wheeler in the rain. Fiery words and figures flashed their announcements, bright as ever, against the soft, lowering, purple blackness of the night. Down the side street Wheeler's theater, since Christina's disappearance, had been dark. It was still closed, but Wheeler must now have taken heart; for dark, save in theatrical parlance, it was no longer. The electric sign—
ROBERT WHEELER
IN
THE VICTORS
had been re-lighted. And beneath this, in letters of equal size and brilliancy ran the surprising legend—
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 20TH,
CHRISTINA HOPE
WILL POSITIVELY REAPPEAR
CHAPTER X
"THE OLD EARL'S DAUGHTER": MRS. PASCOE ON FAMILY TIES
"I know no more than you do," Wheeler said. "Or rather, no more than this." And he spread before them a sheet of writing-paper.