"Oh no. No," and he suddenly felt a most complete if unwilling admiration for the utter finish with which she was playing her side of the act.

"Only you see," and this was Oliver doing his best at the ingenuous boy, "Ted Billett, you know--he said he might be having dinner with you this evening--and I've got a very important letter for him--awful nuisance--don't see why it couldn't have gone in the mail by itself--but the man was absolutely insistent on my delivering it by hand." "A letter? Oh yes. And they want an answer right away?" Again Oliver realized grudgingly that whatever Mrs. Severance might be she was certainly not obvious. For "I'm so glad you came then," she was saying with what seemed to be perfect sincerity. "Won't you come in?"

That little pucker that came and went in the white brow meant that she was sure that she could manage him, sure she could carry it off, Oliver imagined--and he was frank enough with himself to admit that he was not at all sure that she couldn't.

"Oh Ted--" he heard her say, very coolly but also with considerable distinctness, as if her voice had to carry, "there's a friend of yours here with a letter for you--"

And then she had brought him inside and was apologizing for having the front room so badly lighted but one had to economize on light-bills, didn't one, even for a small apartment, and besides didn't it give one a little more the real feeling of evening? And Oliver was considering why, when if as he pressed the bell, he had felt so much like a modern St. George and wholly as if he were doing something rather fine and perilous, he should feel quite so much like a gauche seventeen-year-old now. He thought that he would not enjoy playing chess with Mrs.

Severance. She was one of those people who smiled inoffensively at the end of a game and then said they thought it would really be a little evener if they gave you both knights.

Ted rea.s.sured him though. Ted, stumbling out of the dining-room, with a mixture of would-be unconcern, compound embarra.s.sment and complete though suppressed fury at Oliver on his face. It was hardly either just or moral, Oliver reflected, that Mrs. Severance should be the only one of them to seem completely at her ease.

"h.e.l.lo, Ollie," in the tone of "And if you'd only get the h.e.l.l out as quickly as possible." "Mrs. Severance--" a stumble over that. "You've got a letter for me?"

"Yes. It's important," said Oliver as firmly as he could. He gave it, and, as Ted sat down near a lamp to read it, Oliver saw by one sudden momentary flash that pa.s.sed over Mrs. Severance's face that she had seen the address and known instantly that the handwriting was not that of a man. And then Oliver began to think that he might have been right when he had thought of the present expedition as something rather perilous--he found that he had moved three steps away from Mrs.

Severance without his knowing it, very much as he might have from an unfamiliar piece of furniture near which he was standing and which had instantaneously developed all the electric properties of a coil of live wire. Then he looked at Ted's face--and what he saw there made him want to kick himself for looking--because it is never proper for even the friendliest spectator to see a man's private soul stripped naked as a gra.s.s-stalk before his own eyes. It was horribly like watching Ted lose balance on the edge of a cliff that he had been walking unconcernedly and start to fall without crying out or any romantic gestures, with only that look of utter surprise struck into his face and the way his hands clutched as if they would tear some solid hold out of the air. Oliver kept his eyes on him in a frosty suspense while he read the letter all through three times and then folded it and put it carefully away in his breast pocket--and then when he looked at Mrs. Severance Oliver could have shouted aloud with immense improper joy, for he knew by the way Ted's hands moved that they were going back in the car together.

Ted was on his feet and his voice was as grave as if he were apologizing for having insulted Mrs. Severance in public, but under the meaninglessness of his actual words it was wholly firm and controlled.

"I'm awfully sorry--I've got to go right away. You'll think me immensely rude but it's something that's practically life-and-death." "Really?"

said Mrs. Severance and Oliver could have clapped his hands at her accent. Now that the battle had ended bloodlessly, he supposed he might be permitted to applaud, internally at least. And "I'm sorry--but this is over," said every note in Ted's voice and "Lost have I? Well then--"

every note in hers.

It occurred to Oliver that things were badly arranged--all this--and he was the only audience.

Life seemed sudden lavish in giving him benefit performances of other people's love-affairs--he supposed it was all part of the old and deathless jest.

And then, like a p.r.i.c.kling of cold, there pa.s.sed over him once more that little sense of danger. Mrs. Severance and Ted were both standing looking at each other and neither was saying anything--and Ted looked by his face as if he were walking in his sleep.

"The car's down below, old boy," said Oliver helpfully, and then, a little louder "Peter's car, you know," and whatever cobwebs had been holding Ted for the last instant broke apart. He went over to Mrs.

Severance. "Good-by."

"Good-by," and he started making apologies again while she merely looked and Oliver was suddenly fretting like a weary hostess whose callers have stayed hours too long, to have him down in the car and the car pointed again with its nose toward Southampton.

And then he heard, through Ted's last apologia, the whir of a mounting elevator.

The elevator couldn't stop at the fourth floor--it couldn't. But it did, and there was the noise of the gate slung back and "_What's that?_"

said Mrs. Severance sharply, her politeness broken to bits for the first time.

They were all standing near the door, and, with a complete disbelief in all that he was hearing and seeing, Oliver heard Mrs. Severance's voice in his ear, "The kitchen--fire-escape--" saw her push Ted toward him as if she were shifting a piece of c.u.mbrous furniture, and obeyed her orders implicitly because he was too surprised to think of doing anything else.

He hurried himself and the still half-somnambulistic Ted through the dining-room curtains, just in time to catch a last glimpse of Mrs.

Severance softly pressing with all her weight and strength against her side of the door of the apartment as a man's quick short footsteps crossed the hall in two strides, and after a second's pause, a key clicked into the lock.

x.x.xVIII

Mrs. Severance, her whole weight against the door, felt it push at her fiercely without opening, and, even in the midst of her turmoil, smiled.

Mr. Severance had never been exactly what one would call an athlete--

She slackened her pressure, little by anxious little. Her hand crept down to the k.n.o.b, then she jerked it sharply and stood back and Mr.

Piper came stumbling into the room, a little too fast for dignity. He had to catch to her to save himself from falling but as soon as he had recovered his balance he jerked his hands away from her as if they had taken hold of something that hurt him and when he stood up she saw that his face was grey all over and that his breath came in little hard sniffs through his nose.

"Sorry, Sargent," she said easily. "I heard your key but that silly old door is sticking again. You didn't hurt yourself, did you?"

For an instant she thought that everything was going to be perfectly simple--his face had changed so, with an intensity of relief almost childish, at the sound of her accustomed voice. Then the greyness came back.

"Do you mind--introducing me--Rose--to the gentleman--you are dining with tonight?" he said with a difficulty of speech as if actual words were not things he was accustomed to using. "I merely--called--to be quite sure."

She managed to look as puzzled as possible.

"The gentleman?"

"Oh yes, the gentleman." He seemed neither to be particularly disgusted nor murderously angry--only so utterly tired in body and spirit that she thought oddly that it seemed almost as if any sudden gesture or movement might crumble him into pieces of fine grey paper at her feet.

"Oh, there isn't any use in pretending, Rose--any more. I have my information."

"Yes? From whom?"

"What on earth does it matter? Elizabeth--since you choose to know."

"Elizabeth," said Mrs. Severance softly. She could not imagine how time, even when successfully played for and gained, could help the situation very much--but that was the only thing she could think of doing, and she did it, therefore, with every trick of deliberation she knew, as if any instant saved before he went into the dining-room might bring salvation.

"Do you know, I was always a little doubtful about Elizabeth. She was a little too beautifully incurious about everything to be quite real--and a little too well satisfied with her place, even on what we paid her. But of course is she has been supplementing her salary with private-detective work for you--"

She shrugged her shoulders.

"I suppose you were foolish enough to give her one of your private numbers," she said a trifle acidly. "Which will mean that you will be paying her a modest blackmail all the rest of your life, and you'll probably have to provide for her in your will. Oh, I know Elizabeth!

She'll be perfectly secret--if she's paid for it--she'll never make you willing to risk the scandal by asking for more than just enough. But if this is the way you carry on all your confidential investigations, Sargent--well, it's fortunate you have large means--"

"She doesn't know who I am."

"Oh Sargent, Sargent! When all she has to do is to subscribe to 'Town and Country.' Or call up the number you gave her, some time, and ask where it is."

"There are the strictest orders about n.o.body but myself ever answering the telephones in my private office."

"And servants are always perfectly obedient--and there are no stupid ones--and accidents never happen. Sargent, really--"

"That doesn't matter. I didn't come here to talk about Elizabeth."

"Really? I should think you might have. I could have given you all the information you required a good deal less expensively--and now, I suppose, I'll have to think up some way of getting rid of Elizabeth as well. I can't pay her off with one of my new dresses this time--"

"_Who is he?_"

"Suppose we start talking about it from the beginning, Sargent--?"

"_Where_ is he?"