Mrs. Barker turned away, and ascended the stairs.  Selfishness is quick to recognize selfishness, and she saw in a flash the reason of Van Loo’s abandonment of her.  Some fear of discovery had alarmed him; perhaps Steptoe knew her husband; perhaps he had heard of Mrs. Horncastle’s possession of the sitting-room; perhaps—­for she had not seen him since their playful struggle at the door—­he had recognized the woman who was there, and the selfish coward had run away.  Yes; Mrs. Horncastle was right:  she had been only a miserable dupe.

Her cheeks blazed as she entered the room she had just quitted, and threw herself in a chair by the window.  She bit her lip as she remembered how for the last three months she had been slowly yielding to Van Loo’s cautious but insinuating solicitation, from a flirtation in the San Francisco hotel to a clandestine meeting in the street; from a ride in the suburbs to a supper in a fast restaurant after the theatre.  Other women did it who were fashionable and rich, as Van Loo had pointed out to her.  Other fashionable women also gambled in stocks, and had their private broker in a “Charley” or a “Jack.”  Why should not Mrs. Barker have business with a “Paul” Van Loo, particularly as this fast craze permitted secret meetings?—­for business of this kind could not be conducted in public, and permitted the fair gambler to call at private offices without fear and without reproach.  Mrs. Barker’s vanity, Mrs. Barker’s love of ceremony and form, Mrs. Barker’s snobbishness, were flattered by the attentions of this polished gentleman with a foreign name, which even had the flavor of nobility, who never picked up her fan and handed it to her without bowing, and always rose when she entered the room.  Mrs. Barker’s scant schoolgirl knowledge was touched by this gentleman, who spoke French fluently, and delicately explained to her the libretto of a risky opera bouffe.  And now she had finally yielded to a meeting out of San Francisco—­and an ostensible visit—­still as a speculator—­to one or two mining districts—­with her broker.  This was the boldest of her steps—­an original idea of the fashionable Van Loo—­which, no doubt, in time would become a craze, too.  But it was a long step—­and there was a streak of rustic decorum in Mrs. Barker’s nature—­the instinct that made Kitty Carter keep a perfectly secluded and distinct sitting-room in the days when she served her father’s guests—­that now had impelled her to make it a proviso that the first step of her journey should be from her old home in her father’s hotel.  It was this instinct of the proprieties that had revived in her suddenly at the door of the old sitting-room.