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Nothing could exceed Van Loo's protest of delight at the meeting; nothing his equal desolation at the fact that he was hastening to another engagement. "But your old partner," he added, with a smile, "is waiting for you; he has just received your card, and I should be only keeping you from him. So glad to see you; you're looking so well. Good-by! Good-by!"
Young faces grow softly mellow without those lines and anxious crow's-feet that mar the features of the middle-aged, who, to earn their daily bread or to kill the tedium of their lives, find it necessary to dwell in streets. "Loo's home again," men told each other at "The Black Sailor"; and the women, who discussed the matter in the village street, had little to add to this bare piece of news.
It was well that they did, vacating the room more cheerfully and sympathetically than they had entered it, or Hall's manifest disturbance over Van Loo's visit would have been noticed. When the last man had disappeared Hall turned quickly to Steptoe. "Well, what did he say? Where has he gone?" "Don't know," said Steptoe, with uneasy curtness. "He was running away with a woman well, Mrs.
"We'll pay for it; and I reckon the old lady won't object to taking her share of the damage either, or she isn't Van Loo's mother. Come." Demorest felt himself hurried forward by the energetic Stacy, preceded by the obsequious manager, through a corridor to a handsomely furnished suite, into whose bathroom Stacy incontinently thrust him. "There!
Van Loo's calm, confident air seemed to corroborate these assertions. He was still wondering if the strange coincidence which had brought both mother and son into his own life was not merely a fancy, as far as SHE was concerned, when a waiter brought a message from Mrs. Van Loo that she would be glad to see him for a few moments in her room.
De Loo, being importunate, however "as he usually was," according to his own statement obtained in Burghley's hand a confirmation, by order of the Queen, of De Loo's letter of the 26th December.
Peter had entered the room unobserved and heard the last words. Holding his breath, he gazed down at his darling, his broad shoulders shook, and in a stifled, faltering voice he asked the physician: "Must she die?" "Yes, old friend; I think so! Hold up your head! You have much still left you. All five of Van Loo's children have died of the plague."
Yet now that it was possible that she had met Van Loo that evening, she might have become aware of Van Loo's power over her child. How she would exult, for all her pretended hatred of Van Loo! How, perhaps, they had plotted together! How Van Loo might have become aware of the place where his son was kept, and have been bribed by the mother to tell her! He stopped in a whirl of giddy fancies.
But I'm glad you have spoken, for I can now talk confidentially with you, and as you and she are both in the same ventures, perhaps she will feel less compunction in hearing from you as your own opinion what I have to tell you than if I spoke to her myself. I am afraid she trusts implicitly to Van Loo's judgment as her broker.
"Come, Stacy," said Barker, "I've only invested in shares and stocks like everybody else, and then only on the best advice I could get: like Van Loo's, for instance, that man who was here just now, the new manager of the Empire Ditch Company; and Carter's, my own Kitty's father.
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