“No; Marty’s a very real person.” There was a pause. “What became of him? Did he go?” “Yes, your husband’s trained nurse gave him a message, and he went away.” “Quietly?” The note of disappointment was so plain that Mrs. Baxter asked in answer: “What would you have wanted him to do?” Adelaide laughed. “I suppose it would have been too much to expect that he would drag you and Miss Gregory about by your hair,” she said, “but I own I should have liked some little demonstration. But perhaps,” she added more brightly, “he has gone back to wreck the docks.” At this moment Mathilde entered the room in her hat and furs, and distracted the conversation from Burke. Adelaide, who was fond of enunciating the belief that you could tell when people were in love by the frequency with which they wore their best clothes, noticed now how wonderfully lovely Mathilde was looking; but she noticed it quite unsuspiciously, for she was thinking, “My child is really a beauty.” “You remember Mrs. Baxter, my dear.” Mathilde did not remember her in the least, though she smiled sufficiently. To her Mrs. Baxter seemed just one of many dressy old ladies who drifted across the horizon only too often. If any one had told her that her grandfather had ever been supposed to be in danger of succumbing to charms such as these, she would have thought the notion an ugly example of grown-up pessimism. Mrs. Baxter held her hand and patted it. “Where does she get that lovely golden hair?” she asked. “Not from you, does she?” “She gets it from her father,” answered Adelaide, and her expression added, “you dreadful old goose.” In the pause Mathilde made her escape unquestioned. She knew even before a last pathetic glance that her mother was unutterably wearied with her visitor. In other circumstances she would have stayed to effect a rescue, but at present she was engaged in a deed of some recklessness on her own account. She was going to meet Pete Wayne secretly at the Metropolitan Museum. CHAPTER XII In all her life Mathilde had never felt so conspicuous as she did going up the long flight of stairs at the Fifth Avenue entrance of the museum. It seemed to her that people, those walking past in the sunshine on the sidewalk, and the strangers in town seeing the sights from the top of the green busses, were saying to one another as they looked at her, “There goes a New York girl to meet her lover in one of the more ancient of the Egyptian rooms.”