An Amiable Charlatan | Page 7

little trying for you?" I asked.
She laughed outright.
"If you could only see some of the people he brings up and introduces
to me!"
We talked for some time upon quite ordinary subjects. As the time
passed on, however, and her father did not return, it seemed to me she
became more silent. She told me very little about herself and the few
personal things she said were always restrained. I was beginning to feel
almost discouraged; she sat so long with a slight frown upon her
forehead and her head turned away from me.
"Miss Parker," I ventured at last, "something seems to have displeased
you."
"It has," she admitted.
"Will you please tell me what it is?" I asked humbly. "If I have said or
done anything clumsy give me a chance, at any rate, to let you see how

sorry I am."
She turned and faced me then.
"It is not your fault," she assured me; "only I am a little annoyed with
my father."
"Why?"
"I think," she went on, "it is perfectly delightful that he should have
made your acquaintance. It isn't that at all. But I do not think he should
have made use of you in the way he did. He is utterly reckless
sometimes and forgets what he is doing. It is all very well for himself,
but he has no right to expose you to--to--"
"To what risk did he expose me?" I demanded. "Tell me, Miss
Parker--was he absolutely honest when he told me he was an
adventurer?"
"Absolutely!"
"Was I, then, an accomplice in anything illegal to-night?"
"Worse than illegal--criminal!" she told me.
Now my father had been a judge and I had a brother who was a
barrister; but the madness was upon me and I spoke quickly and
convincingly.
"Then all I have to say about it is that I am glad!" I declared.
"Why?" she murmured, looking at me wonderingly.
"Because he is your father and I have helped him," I answered under
my breath.
For a few moments she was silent. She looked at me however; and as I
watched her eyes grow softer I suddenly held out my hand, and for a
moment she suffered hers to rest in it. Then she drew away a little.

She was still looking at me steadfastly; but something that had seemed
to me inimical had gone from her expression.
"Mr. Walmsley," she said slowly, "I want to tell you I think you are
making a mistake. Please listen to me carefully. You do not belong to
the order of people from whom the adventurers of the world are drawn.
What you are is written in your face. I am perfectly certain you possess
the ordinary conventional ideas as to right and wrong--the ideas in
which you have been brought up and which have been instilled into you
all your life. My father and I belong to a different class of society.
There is nothing to be gained for you by mixing with us, and a great
deal to be lost."
"May I not judge for myself?" I asked.
"I fear," she answered, looking me full in the face and smiling at me
delightfully, "you are just a little prejudiced."
"Supposing," I whispered, "I have discovered something that seems to
me better worth living for than anything else I have yet found in the
world I know of--if that something belongs to a world in which I have
not yet lived--do you blame me if for the sake of it I would be willing
to climb down even into----"
She held out her finger warningly. I heard heavy footsteps outside and
the rattle of the doorhandle.
"You are very foolish!" she murmured. "Please let my father in."
Mr. Parker returned in high good humor. He had met a host of
acquaintances and declared that he had not had a dull moment. As for
the performance he seemed to have forgotten there was one going on at
all.
"I am for supper," he suggested. "I owe our friend here a supper in
return for his interrupted dinner."
"Supper, by all means!" I agreed.

"Remember that I am wearing a hat," Eve said. "We must go to one of
the smaller places."
In the end we went back to Stephano's. We sat at the table at which I
had so often watched Eve and her father sitting alone, and by her side I
listened to the music I had so often heard while I had watched her from
what had seemed to me to be an impossible distance.
Mr. Parker talked wonderfully. He spoke of gigantic financial deals in
Wall Street; of operations which had altered the policy of nations; of
great robberies in New York, the details of which he discussed