Then a new phase of the situation flashed upon her. It was hard for her vanity to accept Van Loo's desertion as voluntary and final. What if that hateful woman had lured him away by some trick or artfully designed message? She was capable of such meanness to insure the fulfillment of her prophecy. Or, more dreadful thought, what if she had some hold on his affections--she had said that he had pursued her; or, more infamous still, there were some secret understanding between them, and that she--Mrs. Barker--was the dupe of them both! What was she doing in the hotel at such a moment?
What was her story of going to Hymettus but a lie as transparent as her own? The tortures of jealousy, which is as often the incentive as it is the result of passion, began to rack her. She had probably yet known no real passion for this man; but with the thought of his abandoning her, and the conception of his faithlessness, came the wish to hold and keep him that was dangerously near it. What if he were even then in that room, the room where she had said she would not stay to be insulted, and they, thus secured against her intrusion, were laughing at her now?
She half rose at the thought, but a sound of a horse's hoofs in the stable-yard arrested her. She ran to the window which gave upon it, and, crouching down beside it, listened eagerly. The clatter of hoofs ceased; the stableman was talking to some one; suddenly she heard the stableman say, "Mrs. Barker is here." Her heart leaped,--Van Loo had returned.
But here the voice of the other man which she had not yet heard arose for the first time clear and distinct. "Are you quite sure?
I didn't know she left San Francisco."
The room reeled around her. The voice was George Barker's, her husband! "Very well," he continued. "You needn't put up my horse for the night. I may take her back a little later in the buggy."
In another moment she had swept down the passage, and burst into the other room. Mrs. Horncastle was sitting by the table with a book in her hand. She started as the half-maddened woman closed the door, locked it behind her, and cast herself on her knees at her feet.
"My husband is here," she gasped. "What shall I do? In heaven's name help me!"
"Is Van Loo still here?" said Mrs. Horncastle quickly.
"No; gone. He went when I came."
Mrs. Horncastle caught her hand and looked intently into her frightened face. "Then what have you to fear from your husband?" she said abruptly.
"You don't understand. He didn't know I was here. He thought me in San Francisco."
"Does he know it now?"
"Yes. I heard the stableman tell him. Couldn't you say I came here with you; that we were here together; that it was just a little freak of ours? Oh, do!"
Mrs. Horncastle thought a moment. "Yes," she said, "we'll see him here together."
"Oh no! no!" said Mrs. Barker suddenly, clinging to her dress and looking fearfully towards the door. "I couldn't, COULDN'T see him now. Say I'm sick, tired out, gone to my room."
"But you'll have to see him later," said Mrs. Horncastle wonderingly.
"Yes, but he may go first. I heard him tell them not to put up his horse."
"Good!" said Mrs. Horncastle suddenly. "Go to your room and lock the door, and I'll come to you later. Stop! Would Mr. Barker be likely to disturb you if I told him you would like to be alone?"
"No, he never does. I often tell him that."
Mrs. Horncastle smiled faintly. "Come, quick, then," she said, "for he may come HERE first."
Opening the door she passed into the half-dark and empty hall.
"Now run!" She heard the quick rustle of Mrs. Barker's skirt die away in the distance, the opening and shutting of a door--silence-- and then turned back into her own room.
She was none too soon. Presently she heard Barker's voice saying, "Thank you, I can find the way," his still buoyant step on the staircase, and then saw his brown curls rising above the railing.
The light streaming through the open door of the sitting room into the half-lit hall had partially dazzled him, and, already bewildered, he was still more dazzled at the unexpected apparition of the smiling face and bright eyes of Mrs. Horncastle standing in the doorway.
"You have fairly caught us," she said, with charming composure;
"but I had half a mind to let you wander round the hotel a little longer. Come in." Barker followed her in mechanically, and she closed the door. "Now, sit down," she said gayly, "and tell me how you knew we were here, and what you mean by surprising us at this hour."
Barker's ready color always rose on meeting Mrs. Horncastle, for whom he entertained a respectful admiration, not without some fear of her worldly superiority. He flushed, bowed, and stared somewhat blankly around the room, at the familiar walls, at the chair from which Mrs. Horncastle had just risen, and finally at his wife's glove, which Mrs. Horncastle had a moment before ostentatiously thrown on the table. Seeing which she pounced upon it with assumed archness, and pretended to conceal it.
"I had no idea my wife was here," he said at last, "and I was quite surprised when the man told me, for she had not written to me about it." As his face was brightening, she for the first time noticed that his frank gray eyes had an abstracted look, and there was a faint line of contraction on his youthful forehead. "Still less," he added, "did I look for the pleasure of meeting you. For I only came here to inquire about my old partner, Demorest, who arrived from Europe a few days ago, and who should have reached Hymettus early this afternoon. But now I hear he came all the way by coach instead of by rail, and got off at the cross-road, and we must have passed each other on the different trails. So my journey would have gone for nothing, only that I now shall have the pleasure of going back with you and Kitty. It will be a lovely drive by moonlight."
Relieved by this revelation, it was easy work for Mrs. Horncastle to launch out into a playful, tantalizing, witty--but, I grieve to say, entirely imaginative--account of her escapade with Mrs.
