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But Merkle's apprehensions were by no means as purely selfish as his immediate train of thought might imply; nor were they by any means confined to the probable cost in dollars and cents of his associate's death.
As the two girls dressed hurriedly for the theater, Adored confessed: "Golly! I'm glad I stayed. He's not bright; he's perfectly silly about some things, and yet he's the most interesting talker I ever heard. And CAN'T he play a piano?" Hannibal Wharton arrived in New York at five o'clock and went directly to Merkle's bank. At eight o'clock Jarvis Hammon died.
"Rotten way to leave a man," Bob mumbled. "I'd rather stick it out and face the music." "Go, go! You're wasting time." Hammon's brow was wrinkled with pain and anger. "You've been good; now hurry." Merkle's thin face was marked with deep feeling. "Yes," he agreed. "There's nothing else for us to do; but tell Orson to 'phone me quick. I'll be back here in five minutes."
Merkle found his chauffeur just closing the garage door, and three minutes later his car was sweeping westward through the Park like the shadow of some flying bird. The vagueness, the brevity of the message that had come to him out of the night made it terribly alarming. Hammon of all men! And at this time! Merkle's mind leaped to the consequences of the catastrophe, if catastrophe it proved.
Lorelei gasped, for on the front page glared black-typed head- lines of the Hammon scandal. John Merkle's name was there, too and linked with it, her own. "Jim!" she cried aghast. "They promised to kill the story." "Humph! Charley Murphy himself couldn't kill that." "What is THIS?" She ran her eye swiftly down the column. "Sure. Melcher commenced suit against Hammon this afternoon.
But say I don't like the looks of this affair." For a second time Merkle appealed to Jim. "If you can't take your sister home I'll have to telephone for another car." Jim's tone was disagreeable as he replied: "You two don't look as if you'd been wrecked. Where's your driver?" Merkle's fist clenched; he muttered something, at which Jim laughed harshly.
Oh, I know; this isn't a conventional party, and I'm not here as a conventional guest inside the little coin-purse he gave me is a hundred-dollar bill but, just the same, I don't care to act as your spy." Merkle's grave attention arrested Lorelei's burst of indignation.
Lorelei was not a little mystified by Merkle's cryptic message, for she could imagine no possible way in which she or the writer himself could be connected discreditably with Jarvis Hammon's affair. She gained some light, however, when that evening she read the note to Lilas. "Why, they're going to blackmail Merkle, too," Lilas exclaimed. "Well, they'd be foolish to let him off, wouldn't they?
Lorelei exploded her bomb at breakfast Sunday morning, and the effect was all she had dreaded. Fortunately, Jim had gone out, so she had only to combat her mother's panic-stricken objections and her father's weak persuasions. So keen, however, was the girl's humiliation at Merkle's disclosure that Mrs.
Hammon's death would mean the ruin of many investors, a general crash, perhaps even a wide-spread panic, and, according to Merkle's standards, these catastrophes bulked bigger than the unhappiness of women, the fall of an honored name, or death itself.
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