A Poor Wise Man Part 17

"How old is he, Lily?" one of them asked, suspiciously.

"Almost fifty, I should say."

"Good heavens!"

Their interest died. She could have revived it, she knew, if she mentioned Louis Akers; he would have answered to their prime requisite in an interesting man. He was both handsome and young. But she felt curiously disinclined to mention him.

The party broke up. By ones and twos luxuriously dressed little figures went down the great staircase, where Grayson stood in the hall and the footman on the doorstep signaled to the waiting cars. Mademoiselle, watching from a point of vantage in the upper hall, felt a sense of comfort and well-being after they had all gone. This was as it should be. Lily would take up life again where she had left it off, and all would be well.

It was now the sixth day, and she had not yet carried out that absurd idea of asking Ellen's friend to dinner.

Lily was, however, at that exact moment in process of carrying it out.

"Telephone for you, Mr. Cameron."

"Thanks. Coming," sang out w.i.l.l.y Cameron.

Edith Boyd sauntered toward his doorway.

"It's a lady."

"Woman," corrected w.i.l.l.y Cameron. "The word 'lady' is now obsolete, since your s.e.x has entered the economic world." He put on his coat.

"I said 'lady' and that's what I mean," said Edith. "'May I speak to Mr.

Cameron?'" she mimicked. "Regular Newport accent."

Suddenly w.i.l.l.y Cameron went rather pale. If it should be Lily Cardew--but then of course it wouldn't be. She had been home for six days, and if she had meant to call--

"h.e.l.lo," he said.

It was Lily. Something that had been like a band around his heart suddenly loosened, to fasten about his throat. His voice sounded strangled and strange.

"Why, yes," he said, in the unfamiliar voice. "I'd like to come, of course."

Edith Boyd watched and listened, with a slightly strained look in her eyes.

"To dinner? But--I don't think I'd better come to dinner."

"Why not, w.i.l.l.y?"

Mr. William Wallace Cameron glanced around. There was no one about save Miss Boyd, who was polis.h.i.+ng the nails of one hand on the palm of the other.

"May I come in a business suit?"

"Why, of course. Why not?"

"I didn't know," said w.i.l.l.y Cameron. "I didn't know what your people would think. That's all. To-morrow at eight, then. Thanks."

He hung up the receiver and walked to the door, where he stood looking out and seeing nothing. She had not forgotten. He was going to see her.

Instead of standing across the street by the park fence, waiting for a glimpse of her which never came, he was to sit in the room with her.

There would be--eight from eleven was three--three hours of her.

What a wonderful day it was! Spring was surely near. He would like to be able to go and pick up Jinx, and then take a long walk through the park.

He needed movement. He needed to walk off his excitement or he felt that he might burst with it.

"Eight o'clock!" said Edith. "I wish you joy, waiting until eight for supper."

He had to come back a long, long way to her.

"'May I come in a business suit?'" she mimicked him. "My evening clothes have not arrived yet. My valet's bringing them up to town to-morrow."

Even through the radiant happiness that surrounded him like a mist, he caught the bitterness under her raillery. It puzzled him.

"It's a young lady I knew at camp. I was in an army camp, you know."

"Is her name a secret?"

"Why, no. It is Cardew. Miss Lily Cardew."

"I believe you--not."

"But it is," he said, genuinely concerned. "Why in the world should I give you a wrong name?"

Her eyes were fixed on his face.

"No. You wouldn't. But it makes me laugh, because--well, it was crazy, anyhow."

"What was crazy?"

"Something I had in my mind. Just forget it. I'll tell you what will happen, Mr. Cameron. You'll stay here about six weeks. Then you'll get a job at the Cardew Mills. They use chemists there, and you will be--"

She lifted her finger-tips and blew along them delicately.

"Gone--like that," she finished.

Sometimes w.i.l.l.y Cameron wondered about Miss Boyd. The large young man, for instance, whose name he had learned was Louis Akers, did not come any more. Not since that telephone conversation. But he had been distinctly a grade above that competent young person, Edith Boyd, if there were such grades these days; fluent and prosperous-looking, and probably able to offer a girl a good home. But she had thrown him over.

He had heard her doing it, and when he had once ventured to ask her about Akers she had cut him off curtly.

"I was sick to death of him. That's all," she had said.

But on the night of Lily's invitation he was to hear more of Louis Akers.

It was his evening in the shop. One day he came on at seven-thirty in the morning and was off at six, and the next he came at ten and stayed until eleven at night. The evening business was oddly increasing. Men wandered in, bought a tube of shaving cream or a tooth-brush, and sat or stood around for an hour or so; clerks whose families had gone to the movies, bachelors who found their lodging houses dreary, a young doctor or two, coming in after evening office hours to leave a prescription, and remaining to talk and listen. Thus they satisfied their gregarious instinct while within easy call of home.

The wealthy had their clubs. The workmen of the city had their b.a.l.l.s and sometimes their saloons. But in between was that vast, unorganized male element which was neither, and had neither. To them the neighborhood pharmacy, open in the evening, warm and bright, gave them a rendezvous.

They gathered there in thousands, the country over. During the war they fought their daily battles there, with newspaper maps. After the war the League of Nations, local politics, a bit of neighborhood scandal, washed down with soft drinks from the soda fountain, furnished the evening's entertainment.

The Eagle Pharmacy had always been the neighborhood club, but with the advent of w.i.l.l.y Cameron it was attaining a new popularity. The roundsman on the beat dropped in, the political boss of the ward, named Hendricks, Doctor Smalley, the young physician who lived across the street, and others. Back of the store proper was a room, with the prescription desk at one side and reserve stock on shelves around the other three. Here were a table and a half dozen old chairs, a war map, still showing with colored pins the last positions before the great allied advance, and an ancient hat-rack, which had held from time immemorial an umbrella with three broken ribs and a pair of arctics of unknown owners.h.i.+p.