"If we find him," he began, as they came to the square, "you--"

"We must try not to be brutal, Larry," warned Peter soberly. "I remind myself that he is an elderly man--"

"If we find him," began Varney again, "you will please remember that he belongs to me. Higginson is strictly my pickings."

Peter grunted, looking rather annoyed too.

They crossed the square, two determined-looking men, and entered the Palace Hotel. Behind the desk a bored clerk sat paring his nails with a pair of office scissors. He looked up with a certain resentfulness.

"Excuse my interruption," said Varney. "Is Mr. Higginson in?"

The clerk's glance lowered tiredly. "Naw. Left town on the four-seven."

"I don't believe it," said Peter instantly.

There followed a silence. So stern were the gazes fastened upon the clerk that, looking hastily up at Peter's word, he promptly lost something of his lordly demeanor and became for the moment almost human.

"Well, sir, he's left _us_. _Said_ he was takin' the four-seven."

"Where did he go?" demanded Varney.

"Don't know, sir, but I think to New York."

"You must know where he checked his baggage to."

"Didn't have any baggage, sir," protested the clerk. "Only his suit-case."

"Did he leave no address for the forwarding of his mail?"

"Naw, sir. He did not."

"Of course not. Why on earth should he?" said Peter.

Desisting from the absent but fierce stare with which he was transfixing the clerk, he drew Varney hurriedly aside.

"All bluff!" he stated positively. "Is it likely, after _his_ day's work, that he'd be lolling around the lobby waiting for us to call? He's _moved_! But depend on it, he's got more work to do, and he _hasn't left town_!"

"If that's so, where do you recommend looking?"

Peter made a large gesture. "That's a horse of another color. I told you he had a faculty for disappearing into a hole and pulling the hole in after him. If anybody besides Ryan knows where he is, I should say that it might be Miss Carstairs. She seems to be his only friend on our side of the fence, since I tipped Hare off."

Varney all but jumped. "I'll ask her!" he offered almost precipitately.

"The very thing!"

"It is quite possible," continued Peter, tensely thoughtful, "that the old rascal has sneaked to her since the luncheon, to try to pump something out of her about our movements--even within the bounds of possibility that he is with her at this moment--"

"A great suggestion!" said Varney cordially. "You certainly have a head on you, Peter. Of course, on the other hand, it is quite possible that he _has_ skipped--made a bee-line for Newspaper Row. In that case, I'll see if she--Miss Carstairs, you know--if she knows his address in New York, and I'll hunt him up to-night."

Peter, glancing at his watch, discovered that he was already fifteen minutes late for his committee meeting.

"For this afternoon, then," he said, unwillingly, "you can have him, if you can find him. After to-day, though, he belongs to me. Wherever he is now, he'll certainly be back on the job to-morrow. Well--I'll leave you, then. Er--Larry. It's just as well not to be prowling around after dark by yourself, you know. I'll be back at the yacht early and we'll have dinner together before your train. Say six-thirty, eh?"

"I'll be there."

Peter hurried off for Hare's house with a mingled sense of unjustly baffled vengeance and vague uneasiness. Varney, drawing a long breath of relief, headed for the telegraph office, whence he dispatched the following telegram to Mr. Carstairs:

"Plan permanently abandoned. Arrive in New York by train 9.20 to-night. Expect me ten minutes later."

That done, he started rapidly down Remsen Street with a steadily mounting spirit.

CHAPTER XX

VARNEY, HAVING EMBARKED UPON A CRIME, FINDS OUT THAT THERE IS A PRICE TO PAY

There was a fine old hedge of box bordering the Carstairs lawn, old rosebushes inside it and many flowering shrubs. Splendid oaks curtained the big white house on either side, shading the expanse of close-clipped turf. At the left, a fountain-sprayer now whirled a mist of water over the trim gra.s.s, and far to the rear a man in rubber boots was hosing off a phaeton before a carriage house. On the back porch, an elderly cook was peeling potatoes and gently crooning some old ballad of Erin.

It was a serene and rea.s.suring scene. Yet upon the s.p.a.cious piazza, which undeniably contributed to the pervading air of all's well, the stunning information came to Varney that the lady of his quest was not at home. Nor could the maid at the door say where her young mistress had gone, or with whom, or when she would return. Possibly Mrs. Carstairs knew, but Mrs. Carstairs was unwell and could not be disturbed. Miss Carstairs would be sorry to miss him, the kind-hearted girl opined, and would he please leave his name?

The young man descended the steps in a state of the flattest depression.

Disappointment, he reflected bitterly, crowded upon the heels of disappointment on this anticlimactic afternoon which yet should have been, in a bigger sense, so gloriously climactic. He had missed his train, and with it his honorable confession to Mr. Carstairs; missed Higginson; last and worst of all--it seemed to him now that this was all that mattered in the least--he had missed Miss Carstairs. In sooth, the world was all awry.

But at the gate, a thought came to him, radiant as a heavenly messenger.

Miss Carstairs was at her seamstress's on the Remsen road. Had she not told him with her own lips that she was to be there at this hour?

He made a _Te Deum_ of the click of the gate, and turned northward a face which bore record of an inner splendor.

He had set out to see Miss Carstairs in order to ask of her if she knew the whereabouts, in Hunston or New York, of the fair-spoken yet elusive Higginson. But with every step he found the force of this errand weakening within him. The memory of that gentleman's villany, so burning a moment since, grew steadily fainter and more inconsequential. Failing to locate him, he would of course make a precautionary round of the newspaper offices in New York that night. At the worst, he told himself with the swift fading of his anger, there was only a remote risk of any unpleasant aftermath. Why, the thing was over and done with--let by-gones be by-gones. As for those other matters supposed to be upon his mind--hints of approaching trouble for himself, and the knowledge of Mr.

Carstairs's bitter disappointment over the collapse of his all but triumphant scheme--he could not for the life of him give them any attention whatever.

A far nearer and more vital matter was pressing upon his mind and heart.

To tell her everything at the moment when the yacht had swung back and he had thrown up his commission forever had been his first strong impulse. He had crushed it down only because he saw that to speak then was to take her at an ungenerous disadvantage. Now Fortune had sent him this new meeting, to be untrammeled by any such restraints. No grim duty governed his movements now; no consciousness of secret chicanery any longer enfolded him like a pall. Already the thought of what he had meant to do came back to him hazily, like the plot of a half-forgotten play. The hobgoblins in a nightmare seemed not more unreal to him now.

His heart sang with the knowledge that he was to see her again, this time with no shadow between.

Two nights' rain had left the road dustless: it was silent and empty.

All about him fell the pleasant evening noises of the wood, but he did not hear them. As he walked, his mind was rehearsing the whole story of his coming to Hunston, as he was now free to confess it to Uncle Elbert's daughter. That she would forgive him he never entertained a doubt. For he would throw himself wholly on her mercy--telling her everything, painting himself as blackly as he could--and suing for pardon only because he had failed.

But when suddenly he saw her, sooner than he had expected, his polished and elaborate phrases dropped from his mind as cleanly as had the recollection of the roguery of Higginson.

It was at that hour when the skies remember the set sun in a gold and pink glow. A little kink in the road straightened out under his swift feet, and a small cottage in a fair-sized lawn jumped out of the woods into vision, almost upon him. On the small square porch, her back to the road, stood Miss Carstairs, talking through the open window to some one in the room beyond.

Varney, having stopped short at the first sudden sight of her, walked on very slowly. Her voice came to him distinctly, and now and then he caught scattering words of what she was saying. She wore her blue dress of the luncheon and the hat which Mrs. Marne, and others, had so admired; and she gave him the odd impression of being somehow _older_ than she had ever seemed before.... Yet she was ten years his junior and three days ago, at this very hour, he had never so much as laid eyes upon her.

"I'll come Sat.u.r.day morning, then," she was saying, "and you'll certainly have them ready for me, won't you? Good-bye."