Page:Dangerous Business (1927).pdf/15

 packed his pillow and shut his eyes. No hurry about that telegram and no use thinking what it meant to him, if it was from Lida. He lay very still, not sleeping and he tried not to think.

"Jay!" Ben spoke to him from the aisle. "Jay; are y'wake?"

Ben was his nearest substitute for a brother. All his life he had known Ben; and through boarding school and college, they had been separated for but one year due to the fact that, when Ben went to Harvard, Jay had failed the entrance examinations and so had dropped back a class. But the next fall, Jay had got in and they had been room-mates at Cambridge for the last year and a half.

Until day before yesterday, there never had been an affair of any importance to Jay which Ben had not known.

Jay, pretending sleep, expected Ben to arouse him. Ben always was up early but he seldom was irritating because of this good habit. Qualities of regularity were inborn in him and Jay appreciated them and depended upon them.

"Y'wake?" whispered Ben again; and went away.

He had the telegram and Jay did not think of that. Ben supposed that it was a dispatch from Jay's father and he had seen many of the sort. In fact, he had seen a few which Jay never had read because Ben had thrown them away. There simply had been no use in letting Jay have some of them; and this, likely, was another.

Accordingly Ben took it to his own place in the next car, and after thinking it over, he pulled out the message, folded so that it displayed, first, a date line at New York at three o'clock that morning and the address to Jay on