Page:Dangerous Business (1927).pdf/181

 Why had his wife left? For how long? Or was she to be back? These questions crowded to Ellen's tongue but she bit her lip and smoothed with cold fingers the pages of her notebook.

He went out bearing image of her small, slender figure bent over her book. She had been in blue, as she often was about the office, a plain, pretty dress with piping of white at the throat and cuffs; and he thought of her hair wound round her head.

Ellen, obliged to answer her questions herself, accordingly believed that the roof of his own meant that his wife would return; and she thought of him in his diggings that night, awaiting her.

Jay was under his own roof, but he was not awaiting Lida. He might go to her but she would never return to Chicago. He knew that his own roof was, in fact, little more than a gesture, an offer of a place for her with him. 'Lida was bent on escape; not from him, for she wanted him with her, but from all that here held him and to-night doubly bound him: for Rountree and Son, having lost Metten, was in danger; Rountree and Son—his father and he—were at the mercy, now, of Lew Alban. And Ellen Powell was right; he couldn't, and he wouldn't, dodge it.