“Chilly night, isn’t it, Harry?” he said, shouldering his companion diagonally across the street toward a stained-glass transparency marking the entrance to a saloon. “I should think you’d freeze in that light overcoat. Let’s go in here and have a nip to go to bed on--what do you say?” Now, no anchoret of the Libyan Desert was ever less a tippler than was Antrim. But the thought of his great disappointment came and grappled with him, and the devil, to whom some very worthy people are yet willing to accord a personality, tempted him with a specious promise of comfort. So he did no more than hang upon the doorstep while Grotter overpersuaded him. This was at midnight, and therein lay one of life’s little ironies. At the very moment when Isabel, kneeling at her bedside, was trying with innocent cheeks aflame to frame the first halting petition for her acknowledged lover, Antrim was entering the house of temptation with the engineer. And presently he joined Grotter in a cup of some insidious mixture in which beaten eggs and liquid fire seemed to be the chief ingredients, sipping it slowly while he listened to the engineer’s stories of his perils by fire, flood, and unruly grade labourers in the mountains. That was the beginning. In the end the devil’s promise was kept after a fashion, inasmuch as Antrim stumbled up the steps of Mrs. Seeley’s boarding house some two hours later in a frame of mind which, whatever may have been its lacks or its havings, was at least bullet-proof on the side of sorrow. CHAPTER XIII “THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY” IN her own way--which was the quietest and least obtrusive of ways--Dorothy was quite as intolerant of mysteries as was her father, and after the evening when Brant had gone forth to seek and to save that which was lost, small mysteries seemed to lie in wait for her at every turn. They began the following day with Brant’s brief visit and abrupt departure. She had heard his voice in the hall, and, a little later, the rustle of skirts as some one--her mother, she thought it was at the time--had gone in to meet him. Of what took place in the drawing-room she knew nothing, but a few minutes afterward, when she was going down to join them, he had stumbled out into the hall, snatched his coat and hat from the rack, and left the house without once looking behind him. So much Dorothy saw from the stair, and she also saw that he was excited and preoccupied, and that his face was the face of one upon whom trouble sharp and serious has come suddenly. When she heard the gate clang behind him she went to the drawing-room and found it empty; whereupon that which had been merely singular became unaccountable. Was it possible that he had taken offense because he had been kept waiting? Dorothy thought she knew him better than that. He was a grown man, and not a foolish boy with a brand new dignity to battle for.