“Just in time,” I exclaimed, “to take a back seat with their evaporated fortunes!”
Beverly chuckled. “Well, if they do evaporate, there will be new ones. Now don’t walk along making Mayflower eyes at me. I’m no Puritan, and my people have had a front seat since pretty early in the game, which I’m holding on to, you know. And by Jove, old man, I tell you, if you wish to hold on nowadays, you can’t be drawing lines! If you don’t want to see yourself jolly well replaced, you must fall in with the replacers. Our blooming old republic is merely the quickest process of endless replacing yet discovered, and you take my tip, and back the replacers! That’s where Miss Rieppe, for all her Kings Port traditions, shows sense.”
I turned square on him. “Then she has broken it?”
“Her engagement to John Mayrant. You mean to say that you didn’t--?”
“See here, old man. Seriously. The fire-eater?”
I was so very much bewildered that I merely stared at Beverly Rodgers. Of course, I might have known that Miss Rieppe would not feel the need of announcing to her rich Northern friends an engagement which she had fallen into the habit of postponing.
But Beverly had a better right to be taken aback. “I suppose you must have some reason for your remark,” he said.
“You don’t mean that you’re engaged to her?” I shot out.
“Me? With my poor little fifteen thousand a year? Consider, dear boy! Oh, no, we’re merely playing at it, she and I. She’s a good player. But Charley--”
“I don’t know, old man, and I don’t think he knows--yet.”
“Beverly,” said I, “let me tell you.” And I told him.
After he had got himself adjusted to the novelty of it he began to take it with a series of thoughtful chuckles.
Into these I dropped with: “Where’s her father, anyhow?” I began to feel, fantastically, that she mightn’t have a father.
“He stopped in Savannah,” Beverly answered. “He’s coming over by the train. Kitty--Charley’s sister, Mrs. Bleecker--did the chaperoning for us.
“Perfectly; invisibly,” said Beverly. And he returned to his thoughts and his chuckles.
“After all, it’s simple,” he presently remarked.
“Doesn’t that depend on what she’s here for?”
He took another turn among his cogitations. I took a number of turns among my own, but it was merely walking round and round in a circle.