"How long has he been doing that?"

"Since I can remember."

"Is he a friend of Mr. Corvet?"

"No friend--no!"

"But Mr. Corvet saw him when he came here?"

"Always, Alan."

"And you don't know at all what he came about?"

"How should I know? No; I do not."

Alan got his coat and hat. The sudden disappearance of the man might mean only that he had hurried away, but it might mean too that he was still lurking near the house. Alan had decided to make the circuit of the house and determine that. But as he came out on to the porch, a figure more than a block away to the south strode with uncertain step out into the light of a street lamp, halted and faced about, and shook his fist back at the house. Alan dragged the Indian out on to the porch.

"Is that the man, Judah?" he demanded.

"Yes, Alan."

Alan ran down the steps and at full speed after the man. The other had turned west at the corner where Alan had seen him; but even though Alan slipped as he tried to run upon the snowy walks, he must be gaining fast upon him. He saw him again, when he had reached the corner where the man had turned, traveling westward with that quick uncertain step toward Clark Street; at that corner the man turned south. But when Alan reached the corner, he was nowhere in sight. To the south, Clark Street reached away, garish with electric signs and with a half dozen saloons to every block. That the man was drunk made it probable he had turned into one of these places. Alan went into every one of them for fully a half mile and looked about, but he found no one even resembling the man he had been following. He retraced his steps for several blocks, still looking; then he gave it up and returned eastward toward the Drive.

The side street leading to the Drive was less well lighted; dark entry ways and alleys opened on it; but the night was clear. The stars, with the shining sword of Orion almost overhead, gleamed with midwinter brightness, and to the west the crescent of the moon was hanging and throwing faint shadows over the snow. Alan could see at the end of the street, beyond the yellow glow of the distant boulevard lights, the smooth, chill surface of the lake. A white light rode above it; now, below the white light, he saw a red speck--the masthead and port lanterns of a steamer northward bound. Farther out a second white glow appeared from behind the obscuration of the buildings and below it a green speck--a starboard light. The information he had gained that day enabled him to recognize in these lights two steamers pa.s.sing one another at the harbor mouth.

"Red to red," Alan murmured to himself. "Green to green--Red to red, perfect safety, go ahead!" he repeated.

It brought him, with marvelous vividness, back to Constance Sherrill.

Events since he had talked with her that morning had put them far apart once more; but, in another way, they were being drawn closer together.

For he knew now that she was caught as well as he in the mesh of consequences of acts not their own. Benjamin Corvet, in the anguish of the last hours before fear of those consequences had driven him away, had given her a warning against Spearman so wild that it defeated itself; for Alan merely to repeat that warning, with no more than he yet knew, would be equally futile. But into the contest between Spearman and himself--that contest, he was beginning to feel, which must threaten destruction either to Spearman or to him--she had entered. Her happiness, her future, were at stake; her fate, he was certain now, depended upon discovery of those events tied tight in the mystery of Alan's own ident.i.ty which Spearman knew, and the threat of which at moments appalled him. Alan winced as there came before him in the darkness of the street the vision of Constance in Spearman's arms and of the kiss that he had seen that afternoon.

He staggered, slipped, fell suddenly forward upon his knees under a stunning, crushing blow upon his head from behind. Thought, consciousness almost lost, he struggled, twisting himself about to grasp at his a.s.sailant. He caught the man's clothing, trying to drag himself up; fighting blindly, dazedly, unable to see or think, he shouted aloud and then again, aloud. He seemed in the distance to hear answering cries; but the weight and strength of the other was bearing him down again to his knees; he tried to slip aside from it, to rise.

Then another blow, crushing and sickening, descended on his head; even hearing left him and, unconscious, he fell forward on to the snow and lay still.

CHAPTER X

A WALK BESIDE THE LAKE

"The name seems like Sherrill," the interne agreed. "He said it before when we had him on the table up-stairs; and he has said it now twice distinctly--Sherrill."

"His name, do you think?"

"I shouldn't say so; he seems trying to speak to some one named Sherrill."

The nurse waited a few minutes. "Yes; that's how it seems to me, sir.

He said something that sounded like 'Connie' a while ago, and once he said 'Jim.' There are only four Sherrills in the telephone book, two of them in Evanston and one way out in Minoota."

"The other?"

"They're only about six blocks from where he was picked up; but they're on the Drive--the Lawrence Sherrills."

The interne whistled softly and looked more interestedly at his patient's features. He glanced at his watch, which showed the hour of the morning to be half-past four. "You'd better make a note of it," he said. "He's not a Chicagoan; his clothes were made somewhere in Kansas. He'll be conscious some time during the day; there's only a slight fracture, and-- Perhaps you'd better call the Sherrill house, anyway. If he's not known there, no harm done; and if he's one of their friends and he should..."

The nurse nodded and moved off.

Thus it was that at a quarter to five Constance Sherrill was awakened by the knocking of one of the servants at her father's door. Her father went down-stairs to the telephone instrument where he might reply without disturbing Mrs. Sherrill. Constance, kimona over her shoulders, stood at the top of the stairs and waited. It became plain to her at once that whatever had happened had been to Alan Conrad.

"Yes.... Yes.... You are giving him every possible care? ... At once."

She ran part way down the stairs and met her father as he came up. He told her of the situation briefly.

"He was attacked on the street late last night; he was unconscious when they found him and took him to the hospital, and has been unconscious ever since. They say it was an ordinary street attack for robbery. I shall go at once, of course; but you can do nothing. He would not know you if you came; and of course he is in competent hands. No; no one can say yet how seriously he is injured."

She waited in the hall while her father dressed, after calling the garage on the house telephone for him and ordering the motor. When he had gone, she returned anxiously to her own rooms; he had promised to call her after reaching the hospital and as soon as he had learned the particulars of Alan's condition. It was ridiculous, of course, to attach any responsibility to her father or herself for what had happened to Alan--a street attack such as might have happened to any one--yet she felt that they were in part responsible. Alan Conrad had come to Chicago, not by their direction, but by Benjamin Corvet's; but Uncle Benny being gone, they had been the ones who met him, they had received him into their own house; but they had not thought to warn him of the dangers of the city and, afterward, they had let him go to live alone in the house in Astor Street with no better adviser than Wa.s.saquam. Now, and perhaps because they had not warned him, he had met injury and, it might be, more than mere injury; he might be dying.

She walked anxiously up and down her room, clutching her kimona about her; it would be some time yet before she could hear from her father.

She went to the telephone on the stand beside her bed and called Henry Spearman at his apartments. His servant answered; and, after an interval, Henry's voice came to her. She told him all that she knew of what had occurred.

"Do you want me to go over to the hospital?" he asked at once.

"No; father has gone. There is nothing any one can do. I'll call you again as soon as I hear from father."

He seemed to appreciate from her tone the anxiety she felt; for he set himself to soothe and encourage her. She listened, answered, and then hung up the receiver, anxious not to interfere with the expected call from her father. She moved about the room again, oppressed by the long wait, until the 'phone rang, and she sprang to it; it was her father calling from the hospital. Alan had had a few moments' consciousness, but Sherrill had not been allowed to see him; now, by the report of the nurse, Alan was sleeping, and both nurse and internes a.s.sured Sherrill that, this being the case, there was no reason for anxiety concerning him; but Sherrill would wait at the hospital a little longer to make sure. Constance's breath caught as she answered him, and her eyes filled with tears of relief. She called Henry again, and he evidently had been waiting, for he answered at once; he listened without comment to her repet.i.tion of her father's report.

"All right," he said, when she had finished. "I'm coming over, Connie."

"Now?"

"Yes; right away."

"You must give me time to dress!" His a.s.sumption of right to come to her at this early hour recalled to her forcibly the closer relation which Henry now a.s.sumed as existing between them; indeed, as more than existing, as progressing. And had not she admitted that relation by telephoning to him during her anxiety? She had not thought how that must appear to him; she had not thought about it at all; she had just done it.

She had been one of those who think of betrothal in terms of question and answer, of a moment when decision is formulated and spoken; she had supposed that, by withholding reply to Henry's question put even before Uncle Benny went away, she was thereby maintaining the same relation between Henry and herself. But now she was discovering that this was not so; she was realizing that Henry had not required formal answer to him because he considered that such answer had become superfluous; her yes, if she accepted him now, would not establish a new bond, it would merely acknowledge what was already understood. She had accepted that--had she not--when, in the rush of her feeling, she had thrust her hand into his the day before; she had accepted it, even more undeniably, when he had seized her and kissed her.

Not that she had sought or even consciously permitted, that; it had, indeed, surprised her. While they were alone together, and he was telling her things about himself, somewhat as he had at the table at Field's, Alan Conrad was announced, and she had risen to go. Henry had tried to detain her; then, as he looked down at her, hot impulse had seemed to conquer him; he caught her, irresistibly; amazed, bewildered, she looked up at him, and he bent and kissed her. The power of his arms about her--she could feel them yet, sometimes--half frightened, half enthralled her. But his lips against her cheek--she had turned her lips away so that his pressed her cheek! She had been quite unable to know how she had felt then, because at that instant she had realized that she was seen. So she had disengaged herself as quickly as possible and, after Alan was gone, she had fled to her room without going back to Henry at all.

How could she have expected Henry to have interpreted that flight from him as disapproval when she had not meant it as that; when, indeed, she did not know herself what was stirring in her that instinct to go away alone? She had not by that disowned the new relation which he had accepted as established between them. And did she wish to disown it now? What had happened had come sooner and with less of her will active in it than she had expected; but she knew it was only what she had expected to come. The pride she had felt in being with him was, she realized, only antic.i.p.atory of the pride she would experience as his wife. When she considered the feeling of her family and her friends, she knew that, though some would go through the formal deploring that Henry had not better birth, all would be satisfied and more than satisfied; they would even boast about Henry a little, and entertain him in her honor, and show him off. There was no one--now that poor Uncle Benny was gone--who would seriously deplore it at all.

Constance had recognized no relic of uneasiness from Uncle Benny's last appeal to her; she understood that thoroughly. Or, at least, she _had_ understood that; now was there a change in the circ.u.mstances of that understanding, because of what had happened to Alan, that she found herself re-defining to herself her relation with Henry? No; it had nothing to do with Henry, of course; it referred only to Benjamin Corvet. Uncle Benny had "gone away" from his house on Astor Street, leaving his place there to his son, Alan Conrad. Something which had disturbed and excited Alan had happened to him on the first night he had pa.s.sed in that house; and now, it appeared, he had been prevented from pa.s.sing a second night there. What had prevented him had been an attempted robbery upon the street, her father had said. But suppose it had been something else than robbery.

She could not formulate more definitely this thought, but it persisted; she could not deny it entirely and shake it off.

To Alan Conrad, in the late afternoon of that day, this same thought was coming far more definitely and far more persistently. He had been awake and sane since shortly after noonday. The pain of a head which ached throbbingly and of a body bruised and sore was beginning to give place to a feeling merely of la.s.situde--a languor which revisited incoherence upon him when he tried to think. He shifted himself upon his bed and called the nurse.

"How long am I likely to have to stay here?" he asked her.