Page:The Plutocrat (1927).pdf/208

 more. "Good-bye," she said, not ungently; and left him.

Angry and a little dazed, he stared after her, regretting that his sympathetic quest for solace in another unhappy person's society had been so ill-advised. Yet there was something curiously piquant in the most insulting thing she had said: "They just thought you didn't know anything." The girl herself, then, thought he did know something; but she evidently believed that it was better to know nothing than to have manners as bad as her own. "Silly!" he said; but was not quite sure that this settled anything.

He descended frowning to his cabin, there to discover something that immediately banished both his irritation and the erratic Miss Olivia Tinker from his mind. Upon his desk there lay a thin blue envelope addressed to him, and on the single sheet of paper inside it he found written in a delicate hand:

He understood nothing except that an enchantment seemed to be just before him; and his lightened heart would not let him sleep until near dawn.