"I hope so," he said, with a touch of sharpness; "I hope you are not going to grow irresolute and changeable, Tony. I detest weakness of character. Perhaps you had better take a trip somewhere and get yourself in tone."
"Perhaps," Tony agreed; his voice was not yielding, but sullen and desperate.
Indeed, he was as near illness as a man may be without physical injury or disease. After his father had left the breakfast-room he sat for a long time in utter mental incapacity to undertake any line of effort. Finally he arose, oppressed with a sense of suffocation in the rich, sombre atmosphere; of imprisonment and helplessness. He wanted air and solitude, the solitude he had come to the breakfast-room to escape, and he could think of no place where he could be so well assured of both as in his motor-car.
In his abstraction he walked bareheaded and without an overcoat across the frozen stretch of lawn between the house and the garage. He was quite indifferent to the weather; his chauffeur put him into furs and passed him his gloves and cap as a matter of course, or he might have fared forth poorly equipped to meet the wind and storm.
He swung his machine from the cement incline into the street and turned across Broadway. He did not wish to pass Elsie Murray ensconced in the park pavilion with Holly Masterson at her knees; yet his thoughts were so swayed by her that when he reached One Hundred and Thirtieth Street he turned west again and took the ferry across the Hudson. He had no better reason for doing so than the tranquillity and content she seemed to draw from contemplating the opposite shore.
He sped up Fort Lee hill with a crowd of other cars, turned west and north to escape their companionship and all the landmarks he knew. He avoided the main highway and chose mere cross and hill roads and lanes. Always he had before him the vivid, pretty face of Lucille, the tired young face of Masterson and the gray eyes of Elsie Murray.
A nurse-maid! The girl who had told him the legend of Raoul Galvez, the girl by whose standard he had come to measure himself and his companions and who had fixed the sluggish attention of his conscience upon the mischief being wrought by his yielding good nature--that girl was Lucille's nurse-maid. That amazement of the night before remained with him, coloring all other emotions. He had come out to arrange his thoughts, but the hours passed and they remained in chaotic condition.