As she spoke an elderly woman came into the room, of a somewhat portly presence--the lady's mother. Seemingly she was in a mood to be garrulous.
"What mustn't he do? Excuse me, Mr. Elmore, for coming in like this, but really, Mabel, I don't know what you are thinking about. I'm sure Mr. Elmore wants to go to his business, and here's all the work at a standstill----"
"All right, mother; Mr. Elmore doesn't want to hear you grumbling at me, I know."
Without waiting for her mother to continue her observations, Miss Joyce bustled out of the room with the breakfast tray in her hands. Left alone with him, the landlady addressed her lodger.
"What's the matter with the girl I can't think; I never saw anything like the change that's come over her the last few days; she looks more fit for a hospital than anything else--and her temper! She never says anything to me; I suppose you don't know what's wrong?"
"Mrs. Joyce, I'm not your daughter's confidant; she certainly says nothing to me in the sense you mean. Why do you take it for granted that anything's wrong?"
"Because I've got two eyes in my head, that's why. She's not the same girl she was; that something's wrong I'm certain sure; but she snaps my nose off directly I open my mouth. I know she thinks a lot of you. I wondered if she'd said anything to you."
"Then I can't understand the girl, and that's flat!"
With that somewhat cryptic utterance Mrs. Joyce went out of the room as impetuously as she had entered. Rodney stood looking at the door for a moment or two, as if in doubt whether she would return. He tore the sheet of paper on which were the two typewritten lines into tiny scraps and dropped them into the fireplace. Re-reading Miss Carmichael's epistle, he obeyed her injunctions, a little tardily, perhaps, and sent the fragments after the others, repeating to himself as he did so a line from an old song:
Then he took an oblong piece of paper out of a letter-case and studied it.
"'Steamship _Cedric_.--John Griffiths, passenger to New York, cabin forty-five, berth A.' I wonder if it will be occupied, or if the money's wasted. That's for to-morrow, or is it to be Buenos Ayres on Friday, or New York on Saturday?"
He had left the house and was descending the steps when a telegraph boy approached, with a yellow envelope in his hand.