第78章 CHAPTER XXVII(2)

"About the size of it."

"Miss Conover?" asked Hawksley.

"Safe. No thanks to you, though. I'd like to knock your block off, if you want to know!"

"Do it! Damned little use to me," declared Hawksley, sagging.

"Here, what's the matter with you?" cried the policeman, throwing his arm round Hawksley.

"They nearly killed him a few days gone. A crack on the bean; but he wasn't satisfied. Help him along. I'll be hiking back."

But the taxicab was gone.

Before Cutty's lieutenant opened the gate to the apartment he spoke to Hawksley. "The boss is doing everything he can to put you through, sir. Miss Conover's wit saved you. For if you hadn't separated they'd have nailed you. I've been running round like a chicken with its head cut off. I forgot that door on the seventeenth floor. I tell you honestly, you've been playing with death. It wasn't fair to Miss Conover."

"It was my fault," volunteered Kitty.

"Mine," protested Hawksley.

"Well, they know where you roost now, for a fact. You've spilled the beans. I'm sorry I lost my temper. The devil fly away with you both!" The boy laughed. "You're game, anyhow. But darn it all, if anything had happened to you the boss would never have forgiven me. He's the whitest old scout God ever put the breath of life into. He's always doing something for somebody. He'd give you the block if you had the gall to ask for it. Play the game fifty-fifty with him and you'll land on both feet. And you, Miss Conover, must not come here again."

"I promise."

"I'll tell you a little secret. It was the boss who sent you out of town. He was afraid you'd do something like this. When you are ready to go home you'll find Tony Bernini downstairs. Sore as a crab, too, I'll bet."

"I'll be glad to go home with him," said Kitty, thoroughly chastened in spirit.

"That's all for to-night."

Kitty and Hawksley stepped out into the corridor, the problem they had sought to shake off reestablished in their thoughts, added too, if anything.

"How do you feel?"

"Top-hole," lied Hawksley. "My word, though, I wobbled a bit going round that block. I almost kissed the hobby. I say, he thought I'd been tilting a few. But it was a lark!"

"Dinner is served," announced Kuroki at their elbows. His expression was coldly bland.

"Dinner!" cried Hawksley, brightening. "What does the American soldier say?"

"Eats!" answered Kitty.

All tension vanished in the double laughter that followed. They approached dinner with something of the spirit that had induced Hawksley to fiddle and Kitty to pass the hat in front of the Metropolitan Opera House. Hawksley's recuperative powers promised well for his future. By the time coffee was served his head had cleared and his legs had resumed their normal functions of support.

"I was so infernally bored!"

"And now?" asked Kitty, recklessly.

"Fancy asking me that!"

"Do you realize that all this is dreadfully improper?"

"Oh, I say, now! Where's the harm? If ever there was a young woman capable of taking care of herself - "

"That isn't it. It's just being here alone with you."

"But you are not alone with me!"

"Kuroki?" Kitty shrugged.

"No. At my side of the table is Stefani Gregor; at yours the man who has befriended me."

"Thank you for that. I don't know of anything nicer you could say.

But the outside world would see neither of our friends. I did not come here to see you."

"No need of telling me that."

"I had a problem - a very difficult one - to solve; and I believed that I might solve it if I came to these rooms. I had quite forgotten you."

Instantly, upon receiving this blunt explanation, he determined that she should never cease to remember him after this night. His vanity was not touched; it was something far more elusive. It was perhaps a recurrence of that inexplicable desire to hurt. Somehow he sensed the flexible steel behind which lay the soul of this baffling girl.

He would presently find a chink in the armour with that old Amati.

Blows on the head have few surgical comparisons. That which kills one man only temporarily stuns another. One man loses his identity; another escapes with all his faculties and suffers but trifling inconvenience. In Hawksley's case the blow had probably restricted some current of thought, and that which would have flowed normally now shot out obliquely, perversely. It might be that the natural perverseness of his blood, unchecked by the noble influence of Stefani Gregor and liberated by the blow, governed his thoughts in relation to Kitty. The subjugation of women, the old cynical warfare of sex - the dominant business of his rich and idle forbears, the business that had made Boris Karlov a deadly and implacable enemy - became paramount in his disordered brain.

She had forgotten him! Very well. He would stir the soul of her, play with it, lift it to the stars and dash it down - if she had a soul. Beautiful, natural, alone. He became all Latin under the pressure of this idea.

"I will play for you," he said, quietly.

"Please! And then I'll go home where I belong. I'll be in the living room."

When he returned he found her before a window, staring at the myriad lights.

"Sit here," he said, indicating the divan. "I shall stand and walk about as I play."

Kitty sat down, touching the pillows, reflectively. She thought of the tears she had wept upon them. That sinister and cynical thought!

Suddenly she saw light. Her problem would have been none at all if Cutty had said he loved her. There would have been something sublime in making him happy in his twilight. He had loved and lost her mother. To pay him for that! He was right. Those twenty-odd years - his seniority - had mellowed him, filled him with deep and tender understanding. To be with him was restful; the very thought of him now was resting. No matter how much she might love a younger man he would frequently torture her by unconscious egoism; and by the time he had mellowed, the mulled wine would be cold. If only Cutty had said he loved her!

"What shall I play?"