第73章 XV(2)

"I'm growing up," replied she with a charming toss of her small head--what beautiful effects the sunlight made in among those wavy strands and strays!

"And you're as lovely as ever--lovelier," he said--and his eyes were the eyes of the slave she had spurned.

She did not spurn him now--and it inflamed his jealousy that she did not. She said: "Oh, what's the good of looks? The town's full of pretty girls. And so many of them have money--which I haven't. To make a hit in New York a girl's got to have both looks and dress. But I must be going. I've an engagement to lunch--" She gave a proud little smile--"at the Astor House. It's nice upstairs there."

"With Bob Culver?"

She laughed. "I haven't seen him since I left his office. You know, Mr. Tetlow took me with him--back to your old firm. I didn't like Mr. Culver. I don't care for those black men. They are bad-tempered and two-faced. Anyhow, I'd not have anything to do with a man who wanted to slip round with me as if he were ashamed of me."

She was looking at Norman pleasantly enough. He wasn't sure that the hit was for him as well as for Culver, but he flushed deeply. "Will you lunch with me at the Astor House at one to-morrow?"

"I've got an engagement," said she. "And I must be going. I'm awfully late." He had an instinct that her engagement on both days was with the same man.

"I'm glad to have seen you----"

"Won't you let me call on you?" he said imploringly, but with the suggestion that he had no hope of being permitted to come.

"Certainly," responded she with friendly promptness.

She opened the shopping bag swinging on her arm. "Here is one of my cards."

"When? This evening?"

Her laugh showed the beautiful deep pink and daz-zling white behind her lips. "No--I'm going to a party."

"Let me take you."

She shook her head. "You wouldn't like it. Only young people."

"But I'm not so old."

She looked at him critically. "No--you're not.

It always puzzled me. You aren't old--you look like a boy lots of the time. But you always SEEM old to me."

"I'll try to do better. To-night?"

"Not to-night," laughed she. "Let's see--to-morrow's Sunday. Come to-morrow--about half past two."

"Thank you," he said so gratefully that he cursed himself for his folly as he heard his voice--the idiotic folly of so plainly betraying his feelings. No wonder she despised him! Beginning again--and beginning; wrong.

"Good-by." Her eyes, her smile flashed and he was alone, watching her slender grace glide through the throngs of lower Broadway.

At his office again at three, he found a note from Tetlow inclosing another of Dorothy's cards and also the promised check. Into his face came the look that always comes into the faces of the prisoners of despair when the bolts slide back and the heavy door swings and hope stands on the threshold instead of the famil-iar grim figure of the jailer. "This looks like the turn of the road," he muttered. Yes, a turn it certainly was--but was it THE turn? "I'll know more as to that," said he with a glance at the clock, "about this time to-morrow."

It was a boarding house on the west side. And when the slovenly, smelly maid said, "Go right up to her room," he knew it was--probably respectable, but not rigidly respectable. However, working girls must receive, and they cannot afford parlors and chaperons.

Still-- It was no place for a lovely young girl, full of charm and of love of life--and not brought up in the class where the women are trained from babyhood to protect themselves.

He ascended two flights, knocked at the door to the rear. "Come!" called a voice, and he entered. It was a small neat room, arranged comfortably and with some taste. He recognized at first glance many little things from her room in the Jersey City house--things he had provided for her. On the chimney piece was a large photograph of her father--Norman's eyes hastily shifted from that. The bed was folded away into a couch--for space and for respectability. At first he did not see her. But when he advanced a step farther, she was disclosed in the doorway of a deep closet that contained a stationary washstand.

He had never seen her when she was not fully dressed. He was now seeing her in a kind of wrapper --of pale blue, clean but not fresh. It was open at the throat; its sleeves fell away from her arms. And, to cap the climax of his agitation, her hair, her wonderful hair, was flowing loosely about her face and shoulders.

"What's the matter with you?" she cried laughingly.

Her eyes sparkled and danced; the waves of her hair, each hair standing out as if it were alive, sparkled and danced. It was a smile never to be forgotten.

"Why are you so embarrassed?"

He was embarrassed. He was thrilled. He was enraged--enraged because, if she would thus receive him whom she did not like, she would certainly thus receive any man.

"I don't mind you," she went on, mockingly. "I'd have to be careful if it was one of the boys."

"Do you receive the--boys--here?" demanded he glumly, his voice arrogant with the possessive rights a man feels when he cares for a woman, whether she cares for him or not.

"Why not?" scoffed she. "Where else would I see them? I don't make street corner dates, thank you.

You're as bad as fat, foolish Mr. Tetlow."

"I beg your pardon," said he humbly.

She straightway relented, saying: "Of course I'd not let one of the boys come up when I was dressed like this. But I didn't mind YOU." He winced at this amiable, unconscious reminder of her always exasperating and tantalizing and humiliating indifference to him--"And as I'm going to a grand dance to-night I simply had to wash my hair. Does that satisfy you, Mr. Primmey?"

He hid the torment of his reopened wound and seated himself at the center table. She returned to a chair in the window where the full force of the afternoon sun would concentrate upon her hair. And he gazed spell bound. He had always known that her hair was fine.