“Yes.  It is late.”  He drew in his breath as if he had something more to say, but the impulse passed.  “Well, good night,” he said from the doorway.

“Good night, old man.”

The next moment the outer door slammed and I heard the engine of the Cannonball throbbing in the street.  Then the quiet settled down around me again, and there in the lamplight I dreamed dreams.  I was going to see her.

Suddenly the idea of being shut away, even temporarily, from so great and wonderful a world became intolerable.  The possibility of arrest before I could get to Richmond was hideous, the night without end.

I made my escape the next morning through the stable back of the house, and then, by devious dark and winding ways, to the office.  There, after a conference with Blobs, whose features fairly jerked with excitement, I double-locked the door of my private office and finished off some imperative work.  By ten o’clock I was free, and for the twentieth time I consulted my train schedule.  At five minutes after ten, with McKnight not yet in sight, Blobs knocked at the door, the double rap we had agreed upon, and on being admitted slipped in and quietly closed the door behind him.  His eyes were glistening with excitement, and a purple dab of typewriter ink gave him a peculiarly villainous and stealthy expression.

“They’re here,” he said, “two of ’em, and that crazy Stuart wasn’t on, and said you were somewhere in the building.”

A door slammed outside, followed by steps on the uncarpeted outer office.

“This way,” said Blobs, in a husky undertone, and, darting into a lavatory, threw open a door that I had always supposed locked.  Thence into a back hall piled high with boxes and past the presses of a bookbindery to the freight elevator.

Greatly to Blobs’ disappointment, there was no pursuit.  I was exhilarated but out of breath when we emerged into an alleyway, and the sharp daylight shone on Blobs’ excited face.

“Great sport, isn’t it?” I panted, dropping a dollar into his palm, inked to correspond with his face.  “Regular walk-away in the hundred-yard dash.”

“Gimme two dollars more and I’ll drop ’em down the elevator shaft,” he suggested ferociously.  I left him there with his blood-thirsty schemes, and started for the station.  I had a tendency to look behind me now and then, but I reached the station unnoticed.  The afternoon was hot, the train rolled slowly along, stopping to pant at sweltering stations, from whose roofs the heat rose in waves.  But I noticed these things objectively, not subjectively, for at the end of the journey was a girl with blue eyes and dark brown hair, hair that could—­had I not seen it?—­hang loose in bewitching tangles or be twisted into little coils of delight.

CHAPTER XXVII

THE SEA, THE SAND, THE STARS

I telephoned as soon as I reached my hotel, and I had not known how much I had hoped from seeing her until I learned that she was out of town.  I hung up the receiver, almost dizzy with disappointment, and it was fully five minutes before I thought of calling up again and asking if she was within telephone reach.  It seemed she was down on the bay staying with the Samuel Forbeses.