Part 17 (1/2)

While in this way defending Sylvia against her own self-reproach, he only succeeded in making her feel still more that she had judged hastily where she should have held all judgment in abeyance, that she had lacked faith where by right she should have shown most faith. But he wished to spare her from confusion.

”I was so proud of you that I could not but suffer all the more. However, don't let us talk of it, my dear”; and waving with a gesture of the hand that little misunderstanding away forever, he resumed:

”Well, I am rather fond of Wallie Hine. I don't know why, perhaps because he is so helpless, because he so much stands in need of a steady mentor at his elbow. There is, after all, no accounting for one's likings. Logic and reason have little to do with them. As a woman you know that. And being rather fond of Wallie Hine, I have tried to do my best for him. It would not have been of any use to shut my door on Barstow and Archie Parminter. They have much too firm a hold on the poor youth. I should have been shutting it on Wallie Hine, too. No, the only plan was to welcome them all, to play Parminter's game of showing the youth about town, and Barstow's game of crude flattery, and gradually, if possible, to dissociate him from his companions, before they had fleeced him altogether. So you were let in, my dear, for that unfortunate evening. Of course I was quite sure that you would not attribute to me designs upon Wallie Hine, otherwise I should have turned them all out at once.”

He spoke with a laugh, putting aside, as it were, a quite incredible suggestion. But he looked at her sharply as he laughed. Sylvia's face grew crimson, her eyes for once wavered from his face, and she lowered her head. Garratt Skinner, however, seemed not to notice her confusion.

”You remember,” he continued, ”that I tried to stop them playing cards at the beginning. I yielded in the end, because it became perfectly clear that if I didn't they would go away and play elsewhere, while I at all events could keep the points down in my own house. I ought to have stayed up, I suppose, until they went away. I blame myself there a little. But I had no idea they would stay so late. Are you sure it was their voices you heard and not the servants moving?”

He asked the question almost carelessly, but his eyes rather belied his tone, for they watched her intently.

”Quite sure,” she answered.

”You might have made a mistake.”

”No; for I saw them.”

Garratt Skinner covered his mouth with his hand. It seemed to Sylvia that he smiled. A suspicion flashed across her mind, in spite of herself. Was he merely testing her to see whether she would speak the truth or not?

Did he know that she had come down the stairs in the early morning? She thrust the suspicion aside, remembering the self-reproach which suspicion had already caused her at this very luncheon table. If it were true that her father knew, why then Barstow or Parminter must have told him this very morning. And if he had seen either of them this morning, all his talk to her in this cool and quiet place was a carefully prepared hypocrisy. No, she would not believe that.

”You saw them?” he exclaimed. ”Tell me how.”

She told him the whole story, how she had come down the staircase, what she had seen, as she leaned over the bal.u.s.trade, and how Parminter had turned.

”Do you think he saw you?” asked her father.

Sylvia looked at him closely. But he seemed really anxious to know.

”I think he saw something,” she answered. ”Whether he knew that it was I whom he saw, I can't tell.”

Garratt Skinner sat for a little while smoking his cigar in short, angry puffs.

”I wouldn't have had that happen for worlds,” he said, with a frown. ”I have no doubt whatever that the slips of paper on which poor Hine was trying to write were I.O.U's. Heaven knows what he lost last night.”

”I know,” returned Sylvia. ”He lost 480 last night.”

”Impossible,” cried Garratt Skinner, with so much violence that the people lunching at the tables near-by looked up at the couple with surprise. ”Oh, no! I'll not believe it, Sylvia.” And as he lowered his voice, he seemed to be making an appeal to her to go back upon her words, so distressed was he at the thought that Wallie Hine should be jockeyed out of so much money at his house.

”Four hundred and eighty pounds,” Sylvia repeated.

Garratt Skinner caught at a comforting thought.

”Well, it's only in I.O.U's. That's one thing. I can stop the redemption of them. You see, he has been robbed--that's the plain English of it--robbed.”

”Mr. Hine was not writing an I.O.U. He was writing a check, and Mr.

Parminter was guiding his hand as he wrote the signature.”

Garratt Skinner fell back in his chair. He looked about him with a dazed air, as though he expected the world falling to pieces around him.