Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/82

 Someone was on the stairway—the janitor's heavy tread. Grover hid in the bedroom, listening. The knock that he was waiting for startled him.

It was a second telegram. "Aldergrove has been trying to get you on long distance all day," said the janitor in a tone of reproof.

"Yes," said Grover. "I wasn't here."

When the door was shut he read the new message.

Anything might happen now; for he was beyond feeling the blows. It was all over.

the twenty-fifth of August and about the fourth day out," wrote Grover, using his knee as a desk and looking up from the paper to stare away at the tumbling gray waves of the Atlantic. He recalled another letter he had written to Geoffrey Saint in the spring: a letter outlining in confident detail a plan for the salvation of his soul. Now that he was, after many setbacks, though perhaps not as confidently as then, on the road toward salvation, it was not going to be easy to explain to Geoffrey, and thereby to himself, how it had all come about. If a lot of self-satisfied nobodies would refrain from spoiling his view of the lovely desolate ocean, he was thinking, it would be