Herrick sat there staring into the street. A newsboy ran past with the last extra of the evening. Two of the interested smokers had just left the restaurant and now stopped in the rain to buy a paper, opening and scanning the flapping sheets against the wind. Ah, yes, of course! He, too, sent for a paper. Yes, there, on the first page--scare headings, but in itself the meagerest fact. Scarcely even insinuations yet--"friends fear some serious accident," "friends deny suicide," "suspicious circumstance--Ten Euyck necklace"--Wheeler's reward, and news three hours old. When he looked up the square seemed full of newsboys; several people as they came into the restaurant had papers in their hands. She was just news, now; disreputable news! "The town's out after her like a hound!"--Wheeler's hand was on his shoulder. "No cabman yet. But they want you, Herrick, on the 'phone."
Stanley's voice told him only to hold the wire. Then a crisper tone asked pleasantly, "Mr. Herrick? This is Henry Kane. I just wanted to ask you--you had an appointment with Miss Hope for noon to-day. If you didn't know she was not at home, why didn't you keep it?"
"You've had no communication with her since last evening? Nothing happened to arouse your anxiety? Nor distrust? No, nothing? And yet, just as it began to rain, you started for a walk in a light suit--or" (the telephone itself seemed to give forth a dry smile) "what I am told was once a light suit, and walked about all day in an equinoctial storm! Taking yourself to the theater at night without changing, without shaving, without dining, but still carrying on your person a good deal of the surface of the earth and of the waters under the earth! Well, sorry to have disturbed you. Only my dear sir, don't trouble yourself to conceal too much. Don't fancy yourself the only man in New York who has been to a moving-picture show." Kane hung up the receiver.
That stunned, sick, silent curse of the man on the wrong side of the law! This attorney fellow was like a hound after her, too! He, then, since he was so clever, in God's name let him find her and find her--soon! It was all he asked!--As Herrick stepped out of the booth into the corridor of mirrors that ran through the building to the next street a page boy came briskly up the gilded lane, pattering out a phrase that washed across Herrick's mind in a wave of sound dimly familiar; he saw the boy turn into the orangerie and through the glass-screen he vaguely watched him wend his way between the little green tables with their golden lamps, lifting his flatted tones into the orange-scented air so that its mechanical legend was caught by trailing vines and mingled with the plashing of a little fountain. His mind aimlessly followled the boy's cry till it was lost in the music of a mezzanine orchestra hidden in the foliage of a tame tropical jungle! This was what they called civilization--this trash which had achieved no mechanism to find her, to protect her! But which could know that she had been struck out of its midst and yet sit there in its futile nonsense, stuffing--A voice rose from the velvet lounge beside him in the toneless delivery of one who reads aloud. It was reading the extra's account of a gesture in a moving picture show. "The police say that boys began reporting it before noon, and, the attention of the theater having been called to the film, its patrons are now offered a thrill of realism by the piano in the orchestra accompanying the gesture with the march from Faust. This time, it will be remembered..."