Only once did she halt in her labors, and then only from surprise.  In a bureau drawer she uncovered a bundle of letters and documents addressed to her husband, which in some way aroused her curiosity.  Swallowing her qualms, she examined the contents.  They proved to be, in the main, letters from Bob’s mother and father urging him to break off his marriage.  Those from Mr. Wharton were characteristically intolerant and dictatorial; those from Bob’s mother were plaintive and infinitely sad.  Both parents, she perceived, had exhausted every effort to win their son from his infatuation, both believed Lorelei to be an infamous woman bent upon his destruction, and, judging from the typewritten reports inclosed with some of the father’s letters, there was ample reason for such a belief.  These reports covered Lorelei’s every movement, they bared every bit of ancient scandal connected with her, they recounted salacious stage gossip as fact and falsely construed those actions which were capable of more than one interpretation.  It gave the girl a peculiar sensation of unreality to see her life laid out before her eyes in so distorted a shape, and when she read the business-like biographies of herself and the members of her family she could only marvel at Bob’s faith.  For evidently he had not answered a single letter.  Nevetherless, after preparing an early breakfast, she sent her trunks down-stairs and ’phoned for a taxi-cab.

CHAPTER XXIV

On Tuesday afternoon a badly shaken, exceedingly frightened young man called at Campbell Pope’s boarding-house.

“Good Lord, Bob!  Been on another bat?” cried Pope, at sight of his caller.  Wharton took a fleeting glance at himself in a mirror and nodded, noting for the first time the sacks beneath his eyes, the haggard lines from nostrils to lip-corners.

“I’m all in.  Lorelei’s quit me,” he said, dully.

“Quit you!” Pope frowned.  “Tell me about it.”

“Well, I climbed the vine again and fell off.  She packed up—­ disappeared—­been gone since Saturday night, and I can’t find her.  Nobody seems to know where she is.  I came up for air Sunday, but ...  I’m hard hit, Pope.  I’m ready to quit the game if I can’t find her; me for a sea-foam pillow, sure.  Oh, I’m not kidding—­I’ll start walking from here toward Jersey. ...  God!  I keep thinking that maybe she took the river.  You see, I’m all gone.”  He sank into a chair, twitching and trembling in a nervous collapse.

“Better have a drink,” Pope suggested; but Bob returned roughly: 

“That’s what broke up the sketch.  I got stewed at Fennellcourt—­ high-hat week-end party—­fast crowd, and the usual trimmings.  Never again!  That is, if I find my wife.”

“Fennellcourt!  Suppose you tell me all about it.  If there’s a chance that it’s suicide—­” Pope’s reportorial instinct brought the last word into juxtaposition with “Fennellcourt,” and he saw black head-lines.