Romance Island | Page 6

St. George," Chillingworth said, "I'll have no

monkey-work. You'll report to me at the old hour, you won't be late;
and you'll take orders--"
"As usual, sir," St. George rejoined quietly.
"I beg your pardon," Chillingworth said quickly, "but you see this is
such a deuced unnatural arrangement."
"I understand," St. George assented, "and I'll do my best not to get
thrown down. Amory has told me all he knows about it--by the way,
where is the mulatto woman now?"
"Why," said Chillingworth, "some physician got interested in the case,
and he's managed to hurry her up to the Bitley Reformatory in
Westchester for the present. She's there; and that means, we need not
disguise, that nobody can see her. Those Bitley people are like a rabble
of wild eagles."
"Right," said St. George. "I'll report at eight o'clock. Amory can board
The Aloha when he gets ready and take down whom he likes."
"On my life, old chap, it's a private view of Kedar's tents to me," said
Amory, his eyes shining behind his pince-nez. "I'll probably win wide
disrespect by my inability to tell a mainsail from a cockpit, but I'm a
grateful dog, in spite of that."
When they were gone St. George sat by the fire. He read Amory's story
of the Boris affair in the paper, which somewhere in the apartment
Rollo had unearthed, and the man took off his master's shoes and
brought his slippers and made ready his bath. St. George glanced over
his shoulder at the attractively-dismantled table, with its dying candles
and slanted shades.
"Gad!" he said in sheer enjoyment as he clipped the story and saw
Rollo pass with the towels.
It was so absurdly like a city room's dream of Arcady.

CHAPTER II
A SCRAP OF PAPER
To be awakened by Rollo, to be served in bed with an appetizing
breakfast and to catch a hansom to the nearest elevated station were
novel preparations for work in the Sentinel office. The impossibility of
it all delighted St. George rather more than the reality, for there is no
pastime, as all the world knows, quite like that of practising the
impossible. The days when, "like a man unfree," he had fared forth
from his unlovely lodgings clandestinely to partake of an evil omelette,
seemed enchantingly far away. It was, St. George reflected, the
experience of having been released from prison, minus the disgrace.
Yet when he opened the door of the city room the odour of the printers'
ink somehow fused his elation in his liberty with the elation of the
return. This was like wearing fetters for bracelets. When he had been
obliged to breathe this air he had scoffed at its fascination, but now he
understood. "A newspaper office," so a revered American of letters
who had begun his life there had once imparted to St. George, "is a
place where a man with the temperament of a savant and a recluse may
bring his American vice of commercialism and worship of the
uncommon, and let them have it out. Newspapers have no other
use--except the one I began on." When St. George entered the city
room, Crass, of the goblin's blood cravats, had vacated his old place,
and Provin was just uncovering his typewriter and banging the tin
cover upon everything within reach, and Bennietod was writhing over a
rewrite, and Chillingworth was discharging an office boy in a fashion
that warmed St. George's heart.
But Chillingworth, the city editor, was an italicized form of
Chillingworth, the guest. He waved both arms at the foreman who
ventured to tell him of a head that had one letter too many, and he
frowned a greeting at St. George.
"Get right out on the Boris story," he said. "I depend on you. The chief

is interested in this too--telephoned to know whom I had on it."
St. George knew perfectly that "the chief" was playing golf at Lenox
and no doubt had read no more than the head-lines of the Holland story,
for he was a close friend of the bishop's, and St. George knew his ways;
but Chillingworth's methods always told, and St. George turned away
with all the old glow of his first assignment.
St. George, calling up the Bitley Reformatory, knew that the Chances
and the Fates were all allied against his seeing the mulatto woman; but
he had learned that it is the one unexpected Fate and the one apostate
Chance who open great good luck of any sort. So, though the journey
to Westchester County was almost certain to result in refusal, he meant
to be confronted by that certainty before he assumed it. To the warden
on the wire St. George put his inquiry.
"What are your visitors' days up there, Mr. Jeffrey?"
"Thursdays," came the