Page:Lippincotts Monthly Magazine-70.djvu/454

446 Behind the two the padded door closed, slipped velvetly into its casing. In the air lingered a faint, very delicate scent. Coverton decided it was primroses! On the table she had left her handkerchief. No idea of ringing and restoring it came to him. Suddenly grown pilferer, he pressed the ridiculously small, ridiculously fine morsel of linen frankly to his lips and slipped it into his pocket.

The night following Mr. Harswater was invited to dine with the director. With hors-d'œuvre Coverton asked his single guest, "What can you tell me of Miss Brookfield, the lovely American girl, your protegée?"

"Protegée only in a sense. I've always taken the stories she sends to Murges' Magazine—they're not bad!" he said indulgently and smiled. "But you have done more. I hear we are to publish a novel?"

Harswater's mood had come warm for topics to be broached with the soup and lingered over with walnuts and wine. A field of subjects tempted him to touch with his chief.

"What further, Harswater?"

"Oh, I know very little of her," he replied indifferently.

"She lives by her pen?"

Harswater searched his mind for some comprehensive fact with which to sum up and dismiss the salad subject of a girl writer.

"She lives abroad with relatives: she has claims upon her, I believe. A mother possibly, something of that order."

"Something of 'that order,' Harswater," smiled Coverton. "A father, then; he's a brute to let her lift a finger!"

"Invalid possibly," murmured the other, and smiled at the gentleman's kind interest.

"I see by the papers," he ventured confidentially, "that Baron Rontgen is to form an international publishing syndicate. What do you think of it?"

Coverton was drinking champagne; he put his glass down and said with too evident lack of interest:

"I think nothing of it. I refused the presidency."

Harswater jumped.

"Refused the presidency!"

The host nodded. "I am tired of this sort of thing." He turned his glass in his fingers, looked up brightly across the table to the older gentleman, and asked abruptly,—

"Have you read 'The Primrose Way'?"

Harswater couldn't remember ever to have heard of it.

"My dear man!—why, ifs Miss Brookfield's novel!"

"Miss Brookfield?" (Fatality.) "Really, Mr. Coverton, I have not read it. There is, you know, so much to read through."