If
you have any message for Mrs. Richie--"
"Oh! Ah;--yes. Remember me to her. All well in Old Chester? Very kind
in you to look me up. I am sorry I--that it happens that--good-by--"
Dr. King nodded and took himself off; and Lloyd Pryor, closing the
door upon him, wiped the moisture from his forehead. "Alice, where are
you?"
"In the dining-room, daddy dear," she said. "Who is Dr. King?"
He gave her a furtive look and then put his arm over her shoulder.
"Nobody you know, Kitty."
"He said something about 'Mrs. Richie';--who is Mrs. Richie?"
"Some friend of his, probably. Got anything good for dinner,
sweetheart?"
As for William King, he walked briskly down the street, his face very
red. "Confound him!" he said. He was conscious of a desire to kick
something. That evening, after a bleak supper at a marble-topped
restaurant table, he tried to divert himself by going to see a play;
he saw so many other things that he came out in the middle of it. "I
guess I can get all the anatomy I want in my trade," he told himself;
and sat down in the station to await the midnight train.
It was not until the next afternoon, when he climbed into the stage at
Mercer and piled his own and Martha's bundles on the rack above him,
that he really settled down to think the thing over.... What did it
mean? The man had been willing to eat his bread; he had shown no
offence at anything; what the deuce--! He pondered over it, all the
way to Old Chester.
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