Chapter XXI - Page 2

might have arrived before her father. The horses dragged themselves to the steps, and Derek Pruyn sprang out.

Instinctively Diane fell back.

"Oh, it's you," she gasped, unable for the instant to say more.

"Yes," he returned, quickly, peering down into her face. "What news?"

"Dorothea hasn't come. The--the other person has gone."

"Gone? How--gone?"

"He went away of his own accord."

"That is, you sent him."

"Not exactly; he was willing to go. He saw he'd been doing wrong."

A porter having come from the hotel and seized Derek's valise, it was necessary for them to go in and attend to the small preliminaries of arrival. When they were finished Derek returned to Diane, who had seated herself in a wicker chair beside one of the numerous tea-tables to which a large part of the hall was given up. Under the eye of the drowsy clerk, who still kept his place at the office desk, she felt a certain sense of protection, even though the width of the hotel lay between them.

"Now, tell me," Derek said, in his quick, commanding tones; "tell me everything."

The repressed intensity of his bearing had on Diane the effect of making her more calmly mistress of herself. Quietly, and in a manner as matter-of-fact as she could make it, she told her tale from the beginning. She narrated her summons from Mrs. Wappinger, her visit to his own house, her arrangements there, her journey to Lakefield, and her interview with Carli Wappinger. Without making light of what he and Dorothea had undertaken to do, she reduced their fault to a minimum, turning it into indiscretion rather than anything more grave. She laid stress on the excellence of the young man's character, as well as on the promptness with which he had relinquished his part in the plan as soon as he saw its true nature. In spite of himself Derek began to think of the lad as of one who had sprung to his help in a moment of need, and to whom he was indebted for a service. Not until Diane ceased speaking was he able to brush this absurd impression away, in the knowledge that Dorothea, who should have arrived nearly two hours ago, was still out in the dark. That, for the moment, was the one fact to which everything else was subordinate.

"I can't understand it," he said, nervously. "If they left New York by six, or even seven, they should have been here by eleven at the latest. That would have given them time for slow going or taking a circuitous route."

He rose nervously from his seat, interviewed the clerk at the desk, went out on the terrace, listened in the silence, walked restlessly up and down, and, returning to Diane, enumerated the different possibilities that would reasonably account for the delay. Glad of this preoccupation, since it diverted thought from