"Oh!" she exclaimed with sudden evidences of interest--"do tell me--is the smaller man you mention Mr. Hare?"
"He is indeed," he answered surprised. "You know him? Oh, yes,--certainly! In Hunston--"
"Know him!" said she in tones of hardly suppressed indignation. "It is he who is responsible for my being caught in this--this annoying predicament."
At something in the way the lady said that, Varney unconsciously chipped twenty years off her age and conceded that she might be no more than thirty-two.
"I"m sorry to hear that," he said with a laugh. "I should say that Mr.
Hare has already had quite enough troubles for one night."
"Oh--then you have seen him this evening?"
"I had the pleasure of meeting him on the square not half an hour ago."
Each waited for the other to say more; and it was the lady who yielded.
She went on hesitatingly, yet somehow as if she were not unwilling to justify herself to this stranger in the curious position in which she found herself.
"It--is very strange--and unlike him," she said doubtfully. "He was to call for me--at quarter past seven--and take me home. I was at the seamstress"s, perhaps quarter of a mile up the road. I waited and waited--and then--Oh--what was that, do you know?"
"Only this old floor cracking. Don"t flatter it by noticing. How odd to find, meeting in this way, that we are both searching for the same man.
Isn"t it?"
"It--seems to me even odder to find that he is not searching for me."
She was sitting, so he judged from the sound, about fifteen feet away.
There was coldness in her voice as she spoke of the candidate. Varney felt sorry for that young man when he next held converse with her. From her voice he had also gathered that the dark rather frightened her, and that the presence of an unknown man had not allayed her uneasiness; though something of her reserve had vanished, he thought, when she found that the intruder knew Mr. Hare.
"Oh, but he was--is!" he cried encouragingly.
"I"m positive that he"s searching for you at this minute. Why, of course--certainly! That would explain the whole thing."
Sitting damply on the dark stairway, he told of J. Pinkney Hare"s evidently impromptu experiences in the public square, which had undoubtedly knocked from his mind all memory of his engagement at the seamstress"s; and of the sudden recollection of it, which, there could be no question, was what had sent him and his new friend bursting out of the house and tearing for dear life up the road.
"I"ll bet," said he, "that not a minute after you turned into shelter, they raced by here after you. Now they"re kicking their heels at the sewing-lady"s, probably soaked through, and wild to know if you got home safely. Oh, he"s being punished for his sins, never fear."
"I--am sorry for your friend," her voice replied. "And I believe that I forgive Mr. Hare--now that I know what detained him. I think I must have heard them go by--just after I got in. Once I was sure I heard voices, but, of course, I was expecting Mr. Hare to be alone."
"Ha!" thought Varney. "A Hunston romance!"
"You don"t know Maginnis," he answered gloomily. "n.o.body in the world ever stays alone long when Maginnis can possibly get to him."
He heard something that he thought might be a faint laugh. And immediately ten years more came off the lady"s age, and she stood at twenty-two. The young man began to consider with less distaste his obvious duty of escorting her home.
In the momentary silence, wood somewhere near them once more creaked loudly and scarily.
"Oh!" came her voice out of the blackness. "Would you mind striking a match and seeing if there isn"t a lamp or something we could light?"
"But I haven"t a match--that"s just it! If I _had_--! Why I a.s.sure you I"ve been wishing for nothing so much as a light ever since you--ever since I came in."
"If I were a man--" she began, vexedly, but suddenly checked herself.
"Are you quite sure you haven"t a single _one_?"
"I"ll gladly look again in all my twenty-seven pockets. I"ve been doing it ever since I arrived, and I"ve gotten rather to like it. But I"m awfully afraid it"s a wild goose chase."
Crack! Crack! went the mysteriously stirring woodwork, for all the world like a living thing; and the lady again said "Oh!" And after that she said: "You are not--in this room, are you?"
"I"m sitting quietly on the steps digging around for matches," he said.
"Would you prefer to have me come in there?"
"Would you mind--? Not that I"m in the least frightened, but--"
"It will give me great pleasure to come--faithfully searching my pockets as I grope forward. Thus," he said, laughing, "I must grope only with my head and feet, which is a slightly dangerous thing to do. Ouch! Where are you, please?"
"Here."
""Here" is not very definite, you know. I have nothing to steer by but my ear. Would you mind talking a good deal for a while?"
"It is not often," she said, with further signs of a thawing in her manner, "that a woman gets an invitation like that."
"Opportunity knocks at your door, golden, novel, and unique."
"The luck of it is that I can"t think of anything to say. Would you care to have me hum something?"
Off came the lady"s gla.s.ses, never to be donned again in fancy or in life; and Varney was ready to admit that there might be ladies in Hunston who were worse-looking than she by far. In the Stygian blackness he collided with a chair and paused, leaning upon the back of it.
"I"d like extremely to have you hum. From your voice, I--I"m sure that you do it div--awfully well. But since you seem to leave it to me, I"d honestly rather have you do something else."
"Yes?"
Larry laughed. "It"s a game. A--an evening pastime--a sort of novel guessing contest. Played by strangers in the dark. You see--I must tell you that ever since you first spoke, my mind has been giving me little thumbnail sketches--each one different from the last--of what you look like."
She said nothing to this; so he laughed again.
"Oh, it"s not mere curiosity, you know. It"s purely a scientific matter with me. The science of deduction. The voice, you know, tells little or nothing. I may say that I have made something of a study of voices, and have discovered that they always go by contraries. For this reason," he laughed gayly, "when you first spoke, I--but perhaps I am simply tiring you?"
There was a small pause, and then the lady spoke, with apparent reluctance:
"I am not tired."
Varney smiled into the great darkness. "Well, when I first heard your voice--ha, ha!--I made up my mind that you could not possibly be less than fifty-two."
He was rewarded with a faint laugh: this time there could be no doubt of it.
"You remember that mythological tunnel where everybody went in old and came out young. This conversation has been like that. Since we have talked," said Varney, "I have knocked thirty years off your age. But much remains to be told--and that is the game. Are you dark?"
"Are you punning?"
"This is no punning matter," he said; and began his third exploration of himself for a match. And above them the water continued to thud upon the roof like a torrent broken out of a dam.