And the door closed behind her. I stood blinking after her a moment; then I fixed my attention gloomily upon the cellarette. Poor little girl and her foolish--but adorably foolish--college bravado! Sorrowfully I locked the cellarette and dropped the key in my pocket.
Then I locked the outer doors of the hall and apartment, leaving the keys unmolested on the inside. On the whole I decided I would not have up the janitor's gossipy wife.
"We will lock up back here, Jenkins, and go over to my rooms at the club for the night."
Jenkins stared fixedly over my head. "Certainly, sir."
"And Jenkins--h'm!" I crumpled a bill into his mechanical palm. "You will never allude to having seen that sweet--um--you understand, Jenkins? Never seem to remember, even to me, that you ever saw any one up here to-night."
"Certainly not, sir," indignantly. "I wouldn't, anyhow."
Yet his eyes, rolling back from the ceiling, seemed to hold me oddly for an instant. In them was a touch of sadness.
"But may I speak of that Mr. Billings, sir? You know, if he comes--"
"Certainly, sir!" Jenkins' mouth closed, traplike.
But all in vain my early rise the next morning, my careful toilet and my dash in a taxi to a florist and then to Tiffany's for a ring. At the pier I dodged about in the crowd, the boy trailing behind me with the big purple box, but not a devilish thing could I see of Frances. By Jove, I almost broke my monocle straining! At last I was sure she must be left, for the last passengers were passing over the gang-plank.
The voice, coarse and hearty, came from an athletic young man in a hurrah suit. On his head, perched jauntily above a mass of yellow hair, was a straw hat with a crimson band.
I stared at him through my glass, but it was not any one I knew at all. I looked at him coldly, for there's nothing so devilish annoying as familiarities from strangers. I thought I could freeze him off.
But he only grinned. "Looking for Miss Billings?"
"I--I haven't seen her," I answered stiffly. But his question alarmed me.
He chuckled in my face. "Guess you don't know her in her clothes, eh, Dicky?" And I did not need the punch he gave me in the side to make me stagger backward. "A thousand thanks, and good-by, old chap. I see they're hauling in the plank."