CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
STORROW was roused out of his reverie by the shrill of the telephone-bell. He glanced at Tor- rie, to see if it had awakened her, and then slipped quietly out of bed. He found that it was Chester Hardy calling him.
" There's something you don't know, I'm afraid, and I feel that you ought to be told," said the voice over its space-annihilating thread of metal.
" What is it ? " asked Storrow, with a quick tightening of the throat as his thoughts involuntarily flew back to the woman so serenely asleep on the bed behind him. What new humiliation, he wondered, was to be flung in his face. But he soon found any apprehension of that nature to be groundless.
" Have you had any word from Charlotte Kirkner? " Hardy was asking him.
" None whatever."
" I was afraid not. Yet a couple of days ago a tele- gram was sent to you, a telegram "
" That telegram never reached me," cut in Storrow, re- calling that this was not the first message from the quar- ter in question which had been held up in transit. He found the smell of the wine-glasses crowded about the desk where he sat more than ever offensive.
" It was a telegram, I'm sorry to say, announcing the death of Mrs. Kirkner at Asheville," explained the un- participating voice over the wire.
Storrow sat silent for a moment or two. It was not the news that was so much a shock to him, it was more
the discovery that his world could have been such a nar-
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