“But I sha’n’t hurt Callan,” she said, suddenly, “you may make your mind easy.”

“You really won’t?” I asked.

“Really not,” she answered.  It relieved me to believe her.  I did not want to quarrel with her.  You see, she fascinated me, she seemed to act as a stimulant, to set me tingling somehow—­and to baffle me....  And there was truth in what she said.  I had let myself in for it, and I didn’t want to lose Callan’s job by telling him I had made a fool of him.

“I don’t care about anything else,” I said.  She smiled.

CHAPTER FOUR

I went up to town bearing the Callan article, and a letter of warm commendation from Callan to Fox.  I had been very docile; had accepted emendations; had lavished praise, had been unctuous and yet had contrived to retain the dignified savour of the editorial “we.”  Callan himself asked no more.

I was directed to seek Fox out—­to find him immediately.  The matter was growing urgent.  Fox was not at the office—­the brand new office that I afterward saw pass through the succeeding stages of business-like comfort and dusty neglect.  I was directed to ask for him at the stage door of the Buckingham.

I waited in the doorkeeper’s glass box at the Buckingham.  I was eyed by the suspicious commissionaire with the contempt reserved for resting actors.  Resting actors are hungry suppliants as a rule.  Call-boys sought Mr. Fox.  “Anybody seen Mr. Fox?  He’s gone to lunch.”

“Mr. Fox is out,” said the commissionaire.

I explained that the matter was urgent.  More call-boys disappeared through the folding doors.  Unenticing personages passed the glass box, casting hostile glances askance at me on my high stool.  A message came back.

“If it’s Mr. Etchingham Granger, he’s to follow Mr. Fox to Mrs. Hartly’s at once.”

I followed Mr. Fox to Mrs. Hartly’s—­to a little flat in a neighbourhood that I need not specify.  The eminent journalist was lunching with the eminent actress.  A husband was in attendance—­a nonentity with a heavy yellow moustache, who hummed and hawed over his watch.

Mr. Fox was full-faced, with a persuasive, peremptory manner.  Mrs. Hartly was—­well, she was just Mrs. Hartly.  You remember how we all fell in love with her figure and her manner, and her voice, and the way she used her hands.  She broke her bread with those very hands; spoke to her husband with that very voice, and rose from table with that same graceful management of her limp skirts.  She made eyes at me; at her husband; at little Fox, at the man who handed the asparagus—­great round grey eyes.  She was just the same.  The curtain never fell on that eternal dress rehearsal.  I don’t wonder the husband was forever looking at his watch.

Mr. Fox was a friend of the house.  He dispensed with ceremony, read my manuscript over his Roquefort, and seemed to find it add to the savour.