Page:The Soft Side (New York, The Macmillan Company, 1900).djvu/96

88 'She doesn't know?' his friend conscientiously echoed.

'Oh, she doesn't know anything! Should you say it's too late to ask for a word with her?'

Chilver, with his eyes on the big hotel-clock, wondered. 'Lateish—isn't it?—when she must have been gone this quarter of an hour to her room.'

'Yes, I'm bound to say she has managed that for herself!' and Braddle stuck back his watch. 'So that, as I haven't time to write, there's nothing for me but to wire her—ever so apologetically—the first thing in the morning from town.'

'Surely—as for the steamer special there are now only about five minutes left.'

'Good then—I join you,' said Braddle, with a sigh of submission. 'But where's the brute who took my things? Yours went straight to the station?'

'No—they're still out there on the cab from which I set you down. And there's your chap with your stuff'—Chilver's eye had just caught the man—'he's ramming it into the lift. Collar him before it goes up.' Bertram Braddle, on this, sprang forward in time; then while at an office-window that opened into an inner sanctuary he explained his case to a neatly fitted priestess whose cold eyes looked straight through nonsense, putting it before her that he should after all not require the room he had telegraphed for, his companion only turned uneasily about at a distance and made no approach to the arrested four-wheeler that, at the dock, had received both the gentlemen and their effects. 'I join you—I join you,' Braddle repeated as he brought back his larger share of these.

Chilver appeared meanwhile to have found freedom of mind for a decision. 'But, my dear fellow, shall I too then go?'

Braddle stared. 'Why, I thought you so eminently had to.'

'Not if I can be of any use to you. I mean by stopping over and offering my—I admit very inferior—aid'

'To Mrs. Damerel?' Braddle took in his friend's sudden