"There’s that poor little blind boy coming down the deck all by himself. You’ll excuse me, won’t you, if I run and help him?"
Beyond this point I had made no progress when we landed in New York. I still knew myself as Jasper Soames. Miss Blair still suspected that I was running away from justice. That I was running away from justice I suspected myself, since how could I do otherwise? All the way up the Bay I waited for that tap on my shoulder which I could almost have welcomed for the reason that it would relieve me of some of my embarrassments.
Those embarrassments had grown more entangling throughout the last days of the voyage. The very good-will of the people about me increased the complications in which I was finding myself involved. Every one asked a different set of questions, the answers I gave being not always compatible with each other. I didn’t exactly lie; I only replied wildly—trying to guard my secret till I could walk off the boat and disappear from the ken of these kindly folk who did nothing but wish me well.
I accomplished this feat, I am bound to confess, with little credit; but credit was not my object. All I asked was the privilege of being alone, with leisure to take stock of my small assets and reckon up the possibilities before me. As it was incredible that a man such as I was could be lost on the threshold of his home I needed all the faculties that remained to me in order to think out the ways and means by which I could be found.
So alone I found myself, though not without resorting to ruses of which I was even then ashamed.
It was Miss Blair who scared me into them. Coming up to me on deck, during the last afternoon on board, she said, casually:
It was a renewal of the everlasting catechism, so I said, curtly:
In her smile, as her eye caught mine, there was a visible significance. "You’ll be a good kid, wont you? You’ll—you’ll keep on the level?"
I made a big effort on my own part, so as to see how she would take it. "If I’m not nabbed going up the Bay."
"Oh, you won’t be. It can’t be as—as bad as all that. Even if it was—" She left this sentiment for me to guess at while she went on. "Where do you expect to stay?"
I was about to name one of New York’s expensive hotels when it occurred to me that she would burst out laughing at the announcement, she would take it as a joke. I realized then that it struck me also as a joke. It was incongruous not only with my appearance, but with my entire rôle throughout the trip. I ended by replying that I hadn’t made up my mind.