“Then?” I cried, impatiently, “and then?”

“You see,” reluctantly admitted Charles Edward, “there wasn’t any then.  I didn’t dine with him, after all.  I couldn’t find it—­”

“Couldn’t find what?”

“Couldn’t find the hotel,” said Charles Edward, defiantly.  “I lost the address.  Couldn’t even say that it was a hotel.  I believe it was a club.  He seems to be a sort of a swell—­for a coeducational professor—­anyhow, I lost the address; and that is the long and short of it.”

“If it had been a studio or a Bohemian cafe—­” I began.

“I should undoubtedly have remembered it,” admitted Charles Edward, in his languid way.

“You have lost him,” I replied, frostily.  “You have lost Harry Goward, and you come here—­”

“On the same errand, I presume, my distressed and distressing sister, that has brought you.  Have you seen her?” he demanded, with sudden, uncharacteristic shrewdness.

At this moment a portiere opened at the side of my back parlor, and Mrs. Chataway, voluminously appearing, mysteriously beckoned me.  I followed her into the dreariest hall I think I ever saw even in a New York boarding-house.  There the landlady frankly told me that Miss Talbert wasn’t out.  She was in her room packing to make one of her visits.  Miss Talbert had given orders that she was to be denied to gentlemen friends.

No, she never said anything about ladies. (This I thought highly probable.) But if I were anything to her and chose to take the responsibility—­I chose and I did.  In five minutes I was in Aunt Elizabeth’s room, and had turned the key upon an interview which was briefer but more startling than I could possibly have anticipated.

Elizabeth Talbert is one of those women whose attraction increases with the negligee or the deshabille.  She was so pretty in her pink kimono that she half disarmed me.  She had been crying, and had a gentle look.

When I said, “Where is he?” and when she said, “If you mean Harry Goward—­I don’t know,” I was prepared to believe her without evidence.  She looked too pretty to doubt.  Besides, I cannot say that I have ever caught Aunt Elizabeth in a real fib.  She may be a “charmian,” but I don’t think she is a liar.  Yet I pushed my case severely.

“If you and he hadn’t taken that 5.40 train to New York—­”

“We didn’t take the 5.40 train,” retorted Elizabeth Talbert, hotly.  “It took us.  You don’t suppose—­but I suppose you do, and I suppose I know what the whole family supposes—­As if I would do such a dastardly!—­As if I didn’t clear out on purpose to get away from him—­to get out of the whole mix—­As if I knew that young one would be aboard that train!”

“But he was aboard.  You admit that.”

“Oh yes, he got aboard.”

“Made a pleasant travelling companion, Auntie?”

“I don’t know,” said Aunt Elizabeth, shortly.  “I didn’t have ten words with him.  I told him he had put me in a position I should never forgive.  Then he told me I had put him in a worse.  We quarrelled, and he went into the smoker.  At the Grand Central he checked my suitcase and lifted his hat.  He did ask if I were going to Mrs. Chataway’s.  I have never seen him since.”