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The editor turned to him quickly. "I am glad to see you here," he said, awkwardly, and he knew not why; then, after a pause, "I trust you can give me some news of Mrs. Delatour. I wrote to her nearly two years ago, but had no response." "Thar's bin no Mrs. Delatour for two years," said Mr. Bowers, contemplatively stroking his beard; "and mebbe that's why. She's bin for two years Mrs. Bowers."
I knew Monsieur Robert Darzac from having been of great service to him in a civil action, while I was acting as secretary to Maitre Barbet Delatour. Monsieur Robert Darzac, who was at that time about forty years of age, was a professor of physics at the Sorbonne.
Max saw himself inquiring for Mademoiselle Delatour just at the moment when the admirers of her topaz eyes were assembling for their meal. He did not like the prospect; but said nothing of his own worries to Sanda, whom he joined on changing trains. Now the meeting with her father was so near, she had to hold her courage with both hands.
Suddenly, however, as he was dully wondering how best to send the heiress to New York without going back himself, a name spoken almost in his ear had the blinding effect of a searchlight upon his brain. "La petite Josephine Delatour," said the young man who lived at Bel-Abbés. He was evidently answering some question which Max had not caught.
Delatour, there was no response. The thought of Mr. Hamlin's cynical prophecy disturbed him, but that gentleman, preoccupied in filling some professional engagements in Sacramento, gave him no chance to acquire further explanations as to the past or the future. The youthful editor was at first in despair and filled with a vague remorse of some unfulfilled duty.
But the one for whom she seemed really to care if it were in her to care for any one except herself was the namesake of whom Max had heard laughing hints. At the time it had not occurred to him that the name of the alleged "cousin" must be Delatour; but so it was though the dark young man with the waxed moustache spelled his name differently, in the more aristocratic way, with three syllables.
Max hesitated an instant, then, realizing from the words he had overheard how conspicuous a character Josephine Delatour evidently was, he thought best to tell Sanda something more of his story than he had told her yet. He sketched the version, vindicating his foster-mother, which he had given to Billie Brookton and the Reeveses a version which all the world at home would, he believed, soon hear.
"Her brother Bob." After a moment's scrutiny of his friend's bewildered face, Mr. Hamlin briefly related his adventures, from the moment of his meeting Bob at the mountain-stream to the barkeeper's gossiping comment and sequel. "Therefore," he concluded, "the author of 'Underbrush' is Miss Cynthia Delatour, one of four daughters of a widow who lives two miles from here at the crossing.
He was civil, however, and glib in French with a South-German accent. Madame Delatour had sold her interest in the hotel to him, Anton Schreiber. Unfortunately there had been a mortgage. The widow was left badly off, and broken-hearted at her husband's death.
Yet like a shadow thrown on the wall behind her was a lurking impression of deformity of body and mind, a spirit cast out of her, to point at something veiled. If there could have lingered in the mind of Max a grain of doubt concerning Rose Doran's confession, it was burnt up in a moment; for the girl was an Aubrey Beardsley caricature of Rose. No need to ask if this were Mademoiselle Delatour.
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