Page:Weird Tales Volume 5 Number 4 (1925-04).djvu/94

 to bid her good-bye. On the contrary, she was dressed in knickers and tweed coat, and the dogs were leashed, the leashes slipped over her left wrist. In her right hand she held the whip she had given me to carry a few nights before.

“I’m going to walk along with you, if you don’t mind. I won’t go in,” she said.

I couldn’t very well object, so she and Boris and Andrei went along up Queens Boulevard with me, very much to the astonishment of other church-going people, of whom not a few were on their way in my direction. I mentioned this to Portia, but she acted rather sulkily for her. and continued to walk along beside me. As we passed the police station—a little boxlike shanty opposite Mike’s store on the boulevard—O’Brien came out and crossed the road toward us.

“Good evenin’, ma’am. Did I see one of your dogs over in the Burnham house grounds last night?” he asked.

Portia straightened up and met his eyes determinedly.

“Neither last night, nor any other night, officer. I keep my dogs on the leash when they’re out, and when they’re not with me in the street, they’re inside ten-foot walls. It was not one of my dogs you saw, I can assure you.”

Her voice became hard and tense then.

“If I were you, I’d keep an eye on those wolves. Is there—is there a white one among them, perhaps?”

Her insinuation was entirely lost on O’Brien. Still, he looked at Boris and Andrei as if he would have liked to put the blame of whatever he had seen upon them. Then he went back across the road.

Portia was more than ever grave after this snatch of conversation.

“Do you see, Aunt Sophie, how the princess is trying to shift blame for something upon my noble dogs? I suppose you don’t understand yet why I am accompanying you? I hope you’ll never have to learn the real reason,” she ended sadly.

“I think you might be doing a sensible thing to take your aunt into your confidence. Portia Delorme.” I responded heatedly. “I’m sorry, but I fear it is a very small and petty feeling on your part that makes you so prejudiced against the Princess Tchernova. She may be cruel and a flirt, but I hardly believe that she is laying deep plans to get a couple of innocent dogs into trouble.”

I couldn’t help laughing. Portia lightened her lips and did not speak again, until she said good-bye at the church steps.

I came out after the service I attached myself to the Arnolds, Aurora having attended with her husband. As we came down the boulevard, we became aware that something of an alarming nature had undoubtedly happened in the vicinity of the stores. There were many people buzzing about, the crowd seeming to center near the drug-store on the corner. Mr. Arnold left us and penetrated the crowd, returning after a minute with exciting news.

Officer O’Brien had been attracted by some large white animal that looked over the hedge of the Burnham place. He went over to investigate, loosening his revolver in case of emergency. It was the firing of his revolver that had attracted people to his rescue, among them Portia Differdale, with her two wolfhounds, which she had loosed from their leashes. (When Mr. Arnold said this, his wife pursed her lips with a significant look and remarked that those dogs were savage beasts that would some day attack her or somebody else.) Boris and Andrei had last been seen disappearing