They had flown around the remaining curves and were at a rear door of the house. Anne jumped out, was gone for ten minutes or so, and emerged with a servant following with a great hamper. This was bestowed at King"s feet, and the car was off again, Anne driving with the ease of a veteran.
"You see," she explained, "late last evening I had news of the serious illness of a girl friend of mine. I went to see her, but after I came back I couldn"t be easy about her, and so I got up quite early this morning and went again. She was much better, precisely as Doctor Burns had a.s.sured me she would be. By and by perhaps I shall learn to trust him as absolutely as all the rest of you do."
"Burns! You don"t mean to say you had him out to see a case last night--after--"
She nodded, and her profile, under the snug gray hat, was a little like that of a handsome and somewhat mischievous but strong-willed boy. "Was that so dreadful of me--as a hostess? I admit that a doctor ought to be allowed to rest when he is away from home, but I knew that he was just back from a long voyage and was feeling fit as a fiddle, as he himself said. And there is really no very competent man in the town where my friend is ill; it was such a wonderful chance for her to have great skill at her service. And such skill! Oh, how he went to work for her!
It made one feel at once that something was being done, where before people had merely tried to do things."
King was making rapid calculation. At the end of it, "Would you mind telling me whether you have had any sleep at all?" he begged.
She turned her face toward him for an instant. "Do I look so haggard and wan?" she queried with a quick glance. "Yes, I had a good two hours. And I"m so happy now to know that Estelle is sleeping quietly that it"s much better than to have slept myself."
"Do you do this sort of thing often?"
"Not just such spectacular night work, but I do try to see that a little is done to look after a few people who have had a terribly hard time of it. But this is all--or mostly--since I came back from my year away. I learned just a few things during that year, you know."
"Your cousin--do you mind?--gave me just a bit of an idea why you went,"
he ventured.
"Oh, Leila Stockton." Her lips took on an amused curl. "Of course Leila would. She--chatters. But she"s a dear girl; it"s just that she can"t easily get a new point of view."
He pressed her with his questions, for his discernment told him that it was of no use, while they were flying along the road at this pace, with a hamper at their feet--or at his feet, crowding him rather uncomfortably and forcing him to sit with cramped legs--no use for him to talk of the subject uppermost in his anxious mind. So he got from her, as well as he could, the story of the year, and presently had her telling him eagerly of the people she had met, and the progress she had made in the study of human beings. It was really an engrossing tale, quietly as she told it, and many as were the details he saw that she kept back.
"I found out one thing very early," she said. "I knew that I could never come back and live as I had lived before, with no thought of any one but myself."
"I don"t believe you had ever done that."
"I had--I had, if ever any one did. I went away to school in Paris for two years; I wouldn"t go to college--how I wish I had! I was the gayest, most thoughtless girl you ever knew until--the thing happened that sent my world spinning upside down. Why, Mr. King, I was so selfish and so thoughtless that I could turn that poor girl away from my door with a careless denial, and never see that she was desperate--that it wanted only one more such turning away to make her do the thing she did."
He saw her press her lips together, her eyes fixed on the road ahead, and he saw the beautiful brows contract, as if the memory still were too keen for her to bear calmly.
"You have certainly atoned a hundred times over," he said gently, "for any carelessness in the past. How could you know how she was feeling?
And she was insane, Miss Stockton said."
"No more insane than I am now--simply desperate with weariness and failure. And I should have seen; I did see. I just--didn"t care. I was busy trying on a box of new frocks from a French dressmaker, frocks of silk and lace--of silk and lace, Jordan King, while she hadn"t clothes enough to keep her warm! And I couldn"t spare the time to look at the girl"s book! Well, I learned what it was to have people turn me from their doors--I, with plenty of money at my command, no matter how I elected to dress cheaply and go to cheap boarding places, and--insist on cheap beds at hospitals." Her tone was full of scorn. "After all, did I ever really suffer anything of what she suffered? Never, for always I knew that at any minute I could turn from a poor girl into a rich one, throw my book in the faces of those who refused to buy it, and telephone my anxious family. They did come on and try to get me away--once. I went with them--for the day. It was the day you met me. And always there was the interest of the adventure. It was an adventure, you know, a big one."
"I should say it was. And when you were at the hospital--"
"Accepting expensive rooms and free medical attendance--oh, wasn"t I a fraud? How I felt it I can never tell you. But I could--and did--send back Doctor Burns a draft in part payment, though I thought he would never imagine where it came from. He did, though. What do you suppose he told me last night when we were driving home?--this morning it was, of course."
"I can"t guess," King admitted, suffering a distinct and poignant pang of jealousy at thought of Red Pepper Burns driving through the night with this girl, on an errand of mercy though it had been.
"He told me," she said slowly, "that he learned all about me while I was in the hospital. One night, when I was at the worst, he sent Miss Arden out for a rest and sat beside me himself. And in my foolish, delirious wanderings I gave him the whole story, or enough of it so that he pieced out the rest. And he never told a soul, not even his wife; wasn"t that wonderful of him? And treated me exactly the same as if he didn"t practically know I wasn"t what I seemed. You see, I wasn"t far enough away from that poor girl"s suicide, when I was so ill last year, but that it was always in my mind. Even yet I dream of it at times."
They were entering a large manufacturing town, the streets in the early morning full of factory operatives on their way to work, dinner-pails in hands and shawls over heads. Anne drove carefully, often throwing a smile at a group of children or slowing down more than the law decreed to avoid making some weary-faced woman hurry. And when at length she drew up before a dingy brick tenement house, of a type the most unpromising, King discovered that her "friend" was one of these very people.
He carried the hamper up two flights of ramshackle stairs and set it inside the door she indicated. Then he unwillingly withdrew to the car, where he sat waiting--and wondering. It was not long he had to wait, in point of time, but his impatience was growing upon him. All this was very well, and threw interesting lights upon a girl"s character, but--it would be nine o"clock all too soon. To be sure, though Red Pepper bore him away, he knew the road back--he could come back as soon as he pleased, with n.o.body to set hours of departure for him. But he did not mean to go away this first time without the thing he wanted, if it was to be his.
She came running downstairs, face aglow with relief and pleasure, and sent the car smoothly away. And now it was that King discovered how a girl may fence and parry, so that a man may not successfully introduce the subject he is burning to speak of, without riding roughshod over her objection. And presently he gave it up, biding his time. He sat silent while she talked, and then finally, when she too grew silent, he let the minutes slip by without another word. Thus it was that they drew up at the house, still speechless concerning the great issue between them.
It was only a little past seven; n.o.body was in sight except a maid servant, who slipped discreetly away. King took one look into a small room at the right of the hall, a sort of small den or office it seemed to be. Then he turned to Anne and put out his hand. "Will you come in here, please?" he requested.
She looked at him for a moment without giving him her hand, then preceded him into the room. There was a heavy curtain of dull blue silk hanging by the door frame, and King noiselessly drew this across. Then he turned and confronted the girl. She had drawn off her motoring gloves, but made no motion to remove either the rough gray coat in which she had been driving or the small gray velvet hat drawn smoothly down over her curls with a clever air of its own. Altogether she looked not in the least like a hostess, but very like a traveller who has only paused for a brief stop on a journey to be immediately continued.
He stood there watching her for a minute, himself a challenging figure with his dark, bright face, his fine young height, his air of--quite suddenly--commanding the situation. And he was between the girl and the door. The two pairs of eyes looked straight into each other.
"Well?" he said.
"Well?" said Anne Linton Coolidge in return.
"Did you expect me to wait any longer?"
"I was afraid you might come and go--and never say so much as "Well?""
said she.
This was more than mortal man could bear--and there was no more waiting done by anybody. When Jordan King had--temporarily--done satisfying the hunger of his lips and arms, he spoke again, looking down searchingly at a face into which he had brought plenty of splendid colour.
"If I had found you in that poor place I thought I should, it would have been just the same," he said.
"I really believe it would," admitted Anne.
Half an hour afterward, emerging from the small room which had held such a big experience, the pair discovered Red Pepper Burns just descending the stairway. He scrutinized their faces sharply, then advanced upon them. They met him halfway. He gravely took Anne"s hand and set his fingers on her pulse.
"Too rapid," he said with a shake of the head. "Altogether too rapid.
You have been undergoing much excitement--and so early in the morning, too. As your physician I must caution you against such untimely hours."
He felt of King"s wrist, and again he shook his head. "Worse and worse,"
he announced. "Not only rapid, but bounding. The heart is plainly overworked. These cases are contagious. One acts upon the other--no doubt of it--no doubt at all. I would suggest--"
He found both his arms grasped by Jordan King"s strong hands, and he allowed himself to be held tightly by that happy young man. "Give us your best wishes!" demanded his captor.
"Why, you"ve had those from the first. I saw this coming before either of you," Burns replied.
"Not before I did," a.s.serted King.
"Not before I did," declared Anne.
Then the two looked at each other, and Burns, smiling at them, his hazel eyes very bright, requested to be restored the use of his arms. This being conceded, he laid those arms about the shoulders before him and drew the two young people close within them.
"You two are the most satisfactory and the dearest patients I"ve ever had," declared Red Pepper Burns.