There were two Harrington motors waiting, both big cars that would carry a lot of baggage. When they were ready it was plain that only two passengers could be carried in one and the third in the second car.
“How shall we manage it?” Mrs. Harrington asked.
“If you don’t mind I’ll let you two go on,” Denby suggested, “and when I’ve sent off a telegram to my mother, I’ll follow.”
“I see,” she laughed, “you want the stage set for your entrance. Very well. Au revoir.”
Monty surprised her by shaking his friend’s hand. “Good-by, old man,” said Monty sorrowfully. He was not sure that he would ever see Steven again.
CHAPTER EIGHT
MICHAEL HARRINGTON walked up and down the big hall of his Long Island home looking at the clock and his own watch as if to detect them in the act of refusing to register the correct time of day. Although it was probable his wife, Monty and the guest of whose coming a wireless message had apprised him, would not be home for another hour, he was always anxious at such a moment.
He was a man of fifty-eight, exceedingly good-tempered, and very much in love with his wife. When Alice had married a man twenty-four years her senior there had been prophecies that it would not last long. But the two Harringtons had confounded such dismal predictions and lived—to their own vast amusement—to be held up as exemplars of matrimonial felicity in a set where such a state was not too frequent.
His perambulations were interrupted by the entrance of Lambart, a butler with a genius for his service, who bore on a silver tray a siphon of seltzer water, a decanter of Scotch whiskey and a pint bottle of fine champagne.
Lambart had, previously to his importation, valeted the late lamented Marquis of St. Mervyn, an eccentric peer who had broken his noble neck in a steeplechase. Like most English house-servants he was profoundly conservative; and after two positions which he had left because his employers treated him almost as an equal, he had come to the Harringtons and taken a warm but perfectly respectful liking to his millionaire employer. Lambart was a remarkably useful person and it was his proud boast that none had ever beheld him slumbering. Certain it was that a bell summoned him at any hour of the day or night, and he had never grumbled at such calls.