when he'll be back," I
answered. "I must write him that Sir Cecil Arrowsmith enjoyed 'Who
Killed Cock Robin?' just as much as common mortals."

Forsythe had paused at the box-office, and in my uncertainty I stuck to
him as the crowd began to surge by.

Arrowsmith's approach was advertised by the peculiar type of tall hat
that he affected, and the departing audience made way for him, or hung
back to stare. At his left were Alice and Mrs. Farnsworth, and they must
pass quite close to me. "Who Killed Cock Robin?" was a satisfying play
that sent audiences away with lightened hearts and smiling faces, and
the trio were no exception to the rule.

Listening inattentively to Forsythe, I was planning to join Alice when
the trio should reach me. She saw me; there was a fleeting flash of
recognition in her eyes, and then she turned toward Arrowsmith. She drew
nearer; her gaze met mine squarely, but now without a sign to indicate
that she had ever seen me before. She passed on, talking with greatest
animation to Arrowsmith.

"Well, remember me to Searles if you write him," I heard Forsythe
saying. I clutched his arm as he opened the office door.

"Who are those women?" I demanded.

"You may search me! I see you have a good eye. That girl's rather nice
to look at!"

Crowding my way to the open, I blocked the path of orderly, sane
citizens awaiting their machines until a policeman pushed me aside.
Alice I saw for a bewildering instant, framed in the window of a big
limousine that rolled away up-town.

I had been snubbed! No snub had ever been delivered more deliberately,
with a nicer calculation of effect, than that administered to me by
Alice Bashford--a girl with whom, until a moment before, I had believed
myself on terms of cordial comradeship. She had cut me; Alice who had
asked me at the very beginning of our acquaintance to call her by her
first name--Alice had cut me without the quiver of a lash.

I walked to the Thackeray and settled myself in a dark corner of the
reading-room, thoroughly bruised in spirit. In my resentment I meditated
flying to Ohio to join Searles, always my chief resource in trouble.
Affairs at Barton might go to the devil. If Alice and her companion
wanted to get rid of me, I would not be sorry to be relieved of the
responsibility I had assumed in trying to protect them. With rising fury
I reflected that by the time they had shaken off Montani and got rid of
the prisoner in the tool-house they