Page:Weird Tales volume 30 number 01.djvu/104

 pinched; who I'm engaged to now. All of that."

French thought for a second, then said:

"No, not exactly. You see, I thought I'd get a new angle and work it in around the fact that you are coming of age tomorrow. Something, perhaps, that the public doesn't know about. Something all your own. That is, if you don't mind."

"Oh, no. I don't mind. Fact is, I'd like the public to know some of the real things in my life. They were always so eager to gobble up the false stuff.

"First, I want to say this: I'm through with all the old wildness. You can quote me directly on that."

His voice seemed to float along, and his eyes gazed across the room through a French window into the slow rain outside.

"No more drunkenness. No more night life. I won't be making your headlines and your scandal columns any more after today. It's a new life for me. Yes, a new life."

A sort of dreaminess crept into the steel heir's weary, dark eyes as he paused in his speech to sigh and rub his neck some more.

French rapidly jotted notes on the memorandum pad and paused occasionally to watch the strange expression on the young man's face. Vandervere talked on and on, for an hour or so, giving intimate details of his life: small, half forgotten incidents that lodge precariously, as it were, in one's mind.

Finally, when it was obvious to French that the interview was at an end, he arose from the deep sofa, thanked Vandervere for granting him the privilege, and got his hat and coat from Felton, who still had the dry blood caked on his temple.

At the door young Vandervere stood for a moment and talked with French, and his last words to the reporter were: "Remember, no more wild times for me. You can quote me on that. It's a new life from now on."

For a moment it seemed that the flicker of a smile crossed the heir's face. Then Felton closed the great oak door, and the rain began to beat in French's face once more.

Somehow, he was glad to be outside in the rain again, away from the strange coldness that the inside of the great old mansion presented; glad to be away from the strange old butler with the gashed and bloody forehead; away from the white-faced young heir who spoke in such a dreamy way of his resolve to put the old life behind him.

The interview had not been at all as French had expected it to be. In his mind he had pictured Vandervere as a smug, self-satisfied young snob who would make insulting remarks to him and decline to grant an interview. It had been so different.

The taxi was still waiting near the iron-grille entrance gate. French entered it and was whisked back to the city, to the spot from which he had departed something like two hours before. He got out, paid the driver, and entered the News-Telegram building.

rapidly through the lobby of the building, he reached the elevator and was carried to the fourth floor. He got out and wound his way through the city room, past his desk, to the cabinet-board partition that blocked off Davis' office.

Smiling broadly, the memorandum pad flopping back and forth in his hand, he walked through the door and faced the red-faced man inside.

"Boy, was that a cinch!" he exclaimed, beaming at the city editor, who had not yet looked up from the paper-littered