and staggered to his feet. He seemed to be on the verge of collapse, his appearance was so pitiable that Ann, coming from the bathroom at this moment, flushed with hot sympathy as she saw him, and cried out angrily, accusingly, to Elinor:
“Oh, leave him alone! Let him sleep if he wants to. Can’t you see he is half dead? Why should we drag him along to Rheims if he doesn’t feel like going? We can put the trip off until tomorrow, anyway. What does it matter when we go?”
Elinor smiled firmly and shook her head with a short inflexible movement. “No, sir,” she said quietly. “Nothing is going to be put off. We are going today, as we planned. And Mr. Starwick is going with us! He may go willingly or against his will, he may be conscious or unconscious when he gets there, but, alive or dead, he’s going!”
At these unhappy tidings, Starwick groaned miserably again. She turned to him and, her voice deepening to the authority of indignation, she said:
“Frank! You’ve got to see this through! There’s no getting out of it now! If you don’t feel well, that’s just too bad—but you’ve got to see this thing through, anyway! You’ve known about this trip for the past week—if you chose to spend last night making the rounds of every joint in Montmartre you’ve no one to blame for it but yourself! But you’ve got to go. You’re not going to let us down this time!”
And steeled and wakened by the challenge of her tone—that challenge which one meets so often in people who have let their whole life go to hell, and lacking stamina for life’s larger consequences insist on it for trivialities—he raised his head, looked at her with angry, bloodshot eyes, and said quietly:
“Very well, I’ll go. But I resent your asking it very much!”
“All right, my dear,” she said quietly. “If you resent it, you resent it—and that’s that! Only, when you make a promise to your friends they expect you to live up to it.”
“Ace,” said Starwick coldly. “Quite.”
“And now,” she spoke more kindly, “why don’t you go into the bathroom, Frank, and straighten up a bit? A little cold water across your head and shoulders would do you no end of good.” She turned to Ann and said quietly: “Did you finish in there?”
“Yes,” said Ann curtly, “it’s all right now. I’ve cleaned it up.” For a minute she stared sullenly at the older woman, and suddenly burst into her short and angry laugh:
