“Oh, you did, did you?” said the girl, scarcely less insolently than she had spoken to Mrs. Mandel. “I should like to know what you did it for? I’d like to know what made you think I wasn’t able to take care of myself. I just knew somebody had been meddling, but I didn’t suppose it was you. I can manage my own affairs in my own way, if you please, and I’ll thank you after this to leave me to myself in what don’t concern you.”
“Don’t concern me? You impudent jade!” her father began.
Christine advanced from the doorway toward the table; she had her hands closed upon what seemed trinkets, some of which glittered and dangled from them. She said, “Will you go to him and tell him that this meddlesome minx, here, had no business to say anything about me to him, and you take it all back?”
“No!” shouted the old man. “And if—”
“That’s all I want of you!” the girl shouted in her turn. “Here are your presents.” With both hands she flung the jewels—pins and rings and earrings and bracelets—among the breakfast-dishes, from which some of them sprang to the floor. She stood a moment to pull the intaglio ring from the finger where Beaton put it a year ago, and dashed that at her father’s plate. Then she whirled out of the room, and they heard her running upstairs.
The old man made a start toward her, but he fell back in his chair before she was gone, and, with a fierce, grinding movement of his jaws, controlled himself. “Take—take those things up,” he gasped to Mrs. Mandel. He seemed unable to rise again from his chair; but when she asked him if he were unwell, he said no, with an air of offence, and got quickly to his feet. He mechanically picked up the intaglio ring from the table while he stood there, and put it on his little finger; his hand was not much bigger than Christine’s. “How do you suppose she found it out?” he asked, after a moment.
“She seems to have merely suspected it,” said Mrs. Mandel, in a tremor, and with the fright in her eyes which Christine’s violence had brought there.
“Well, it don’t make any difference. She had to know, somehow, and now she knows.” He started toward the door of the library, as if to go into the hall, where his hat and coat hung.
“Mr. Dryfoos,” palpitated Mrs. Mandel, “I can’t remain here, after the language your daughter has used to me—I can’t let you leave me—I—I’m afraid of her—”
“Lock yourself up, then,” said the old man, rudely. He added, from the hall before he went out, “I reckon she’ll quiet down now.”
He took the Elevated road. The strike seemed a very far-off thing, though the paper he bought to look up the stock-market was full of noisy typography about yesterday’s troubles on the surface lines. Among the millions in Wall Street there was some joking and some swearing, but not much thinking, about the six thousand men who had taken such chances in their attempt to better their condition. Dryfoos heard nothing of the strike in the lobby of the Stock Exchange, where he spent two or three hours watching a favorite stock of his go up and go down under the betting. By the time the Exchange closed it had risen eight points, and on this and some other investments he was five thousand dollars richer than he had been in the morning. But he had expected to be richer still, and he was by no means satisfied with his luck. All through the excitement of his winning and losing had played the dull, murderous rage he felt toward the child who had defied him, and when the game was over and he started home his rage mounted into a sort of frenzy; he would teach her, he would break her. He walked a long way without thinking, and then waited for a car. None came, and he hailed a passing coupé.
“What has got all the cars?” he demanded of the driver, who jumped down from his box to open the door for him and get his direction.
“Been away?” asked the driver. “Hasn’t been any car along for a week. Strike.”
“Oh yes,” said Dryfoos. He felt suddenly giddy, and he remained staring at the driver after he had taken his seat.
The man asked, “Where to?”
Dryfoos could not think of his street or number, and he said, with uncontrollable fury: “I told you once! Go up to West Eleventh, and drive along slow on the south side; I’ll show you the place.”
He could not remember the number of Every Other Week office, where he suddenly decided to stop before he went home. He wished to see Fulkerson, and ask him something about Beaton: whether he had been about lately, and whether he had dropped any hint of what had happened concerning Christine; Dryfoos believed that Fulkerson was in the fellow’s confidence.
There was nobody but Conrad in the counting-room, whither Dryfoos returned after glancing into Fulkerson’s empty office. “Where’s Fulkerson?” he asked, sitting down with his hat on.
“He went out a few moments ago,” said Conrad, glancing at the clock. “I’m afraid he isn’t coming back again today, if you wanted to see him.”
Dryfoos twisted his head sidewise and upward to indicate March’s room. “That other fellow out, too?”
“He went just before Mr. Fulkerson,” answered Conrad.
“Do you generally knock off here in the middle of the afternoon?” asked the old man.
“No,” said Conrad, as patiently as if his father had not been there a score of times and found the whole staff of Every Other Week at work between four and five. “Mr. March, you know, always takes a good deal of his work home with him, and I suppose Mr. Fulkerson went out so early because there isn’t much
