"
She laughed softly. "You are simply incorrigible, and I should think
there would be times when Patricia would be tempted to stick pins into
you," she mocked. Then: "Come on; we are wasting time," and, entering
the house, she took his hand and led him through a dark passage, up a
stair, through another passage into a long, low-pitched room, bare and
empty save for a great pyramid of dining-tables and chairs piled in the
middle of it, and lastly through a cautiously opened door which admitted
a flood of yellow lamp-light from below.
"The musicians' gallery," she whispered. "Go to the screen and look
down, but for Heaven's sake, don't make any noise!"
Blount obeyed mechanically. The orchestra gallery, screened on three
sides by an open fretwork of Moorish design, was built out from the wall
of the dining-room, and through the latticings of the fretwork he could
look down upon the oblong lobby of the resort hotel. There was a
table-desk with lamps on it drawn out in front of a cheerful wood-fire
burning in a great stone fireplace, and in front of the fire, standing
with his back to the blaze, Blount saw his father. From a lighted room
at the opposite end of the lobby space came a confused clattering of
telegraph instruments. Blount caught a glimpse of shirt-sleeved clerks
moving about in the room beyond, and then a door opened beneath him and
the vice-president of the Transcontinental Company strode out into the
firelight to shake hands with his visitor and to say: "I've been looking
for you; I thought you'd come in out of the wet before it was too late,
David.
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