smiled apologetically. It was a singularly charming and somehow entirely confident smile, and Julius Bushmill was filled with a mixture of pity and awe. There was something of the snob in him, as there is in all self-made men, and he realized that this young man was telling the defiant truth.
“Any plans?”
“No.”
“Any abilities—or talents?”
Corcoran considered.
“I can speak most languages,” he said. “But talents—I’m afraid the only one I have is for spending money.”
“How do you know you’ve got that?”
“I can’t very well help knowing it.” Again he hesitated. “I’ve just finished running through a matter of half a million dollars.”
Bushmill’s exclamation died on its first syllable as a new voice, impatient, reproachful and cheerfully anxious, shattered the seclusion of the grill.
“Have you seen a man without a vest named Bushmill? A very old man about fifty? We’ve been waiting for him about two or three hours.”
“Hallie,” called Bushmill, with a groan of remorse, “here I am. I’d forgotten you were alive.”
“Don’t flatter yourself it’s you we missed,” said Hallie, coming up. “It’s only your money. Mama and I want food—and we must look it: two nice French gentlemen wanted to take us to dinner while we were waiting in the hall!”
“This is Mr. Corcoran,” said Bushmill. “My daughter.”
Hallie Bushmill was young and vivid and light, with boy’s hair and a brow that bulged just slightly, like a baby’s brow, and under it small perfect features that danced up and down when she smiled. She was constantly repressing their tendency toward irresponsible gaiety, as if she feared that, once encouraged, they would never come back to kindergarten under that childish brow anymore.
“Mr. Corcoran was born here in the Ritz,” announced her father. “I’m sorry I kept you and your mother waiting, but to tell the truth we’ve been fixing up a little surprise.” He looked at Corcoran and winked perceptibly. “As you know, I’ve got to go to England day after tomorrow and do some business in those ugly industrial towns. My plan was that you and your mother should make a month’s tour of Belgium and Holland and end up at Amsterdam, where Hallie’s—where Mr. Nosby will meet you—”
“Yes, I know all that,” said Hallie. “Go on. Let’s have the surprise.”
“I had planned to engage a courier,” continued Mr. Bushmill, “but fortunately I ran into my friend Corcoran this evening and he’s agreed to go instead.”
“I haven’t said a word—” interrupted Corcoran in amazement, but Bushmill continued with a decisive wave of his hand:
“Brought up in Europe, he knows it like a book; born in the Ritz, he understands hotels; taught by experience”—here he looked significantly at Corcoran—“taught by experience, he can prevent you and your mother from being extravagant and show you how to observe the happy mean.”
“Great!” Hallie looked at Corcoran with interest. “We’ll have a regular loop, Mr.—”
She broke off. During the last few minutes a strange expression had come into Corcoran’s face. It spread suddenly now into a sort of frightened pallor.
“Mr. Bushmill,” he said with an effort, “I’ve got to speak to you alone—at once. It’s very important. I—”
Hallie jumped to her feet.
“I’ll wait with Mother,” she said with a curious glance. “Hurry—both of you.”
As she left the bar, Bushmill turned to Corcoran anxiously.
“What is it?” he demanded. “What do you want to say?”
“I just wanted to tell you that I’m going to faint,” said Corcoran.
And with remarkable promptitude he did.
II
In spite of the immediate liking that Bushmill had taken to young Corcoran, a certain corroboratory investigation was, of course, necessary. The Paris branch of the New York bank that had handled the last of the half-million told him what he needed to know. Corcoran was not given to drink, heavy gambling or vice; he simply spent money—that was all. Various people, including certain officers of the bank who had known his family, had tried to argue with him at one time or another, but he was apparently an incurable spendthrift. A childhood and youth in Europe with a wildly indulgent mother had somehow robbed him of all sense of value or proportion.
Satisfied, Bushmill asked no more—no one knew what had become of the money and, even if they had, a certain delicacy would have prevented him from inquiring more deeply into Corcoran’s short past. But he did take occasion to utter a few parting admonitions before the expedition boarded the train.
“I’m letting you hold the purse strings because I think you’ve learned your lesson,” he said, “but just remember that this time the money isn’t your own. All that belongs to you is the seventy-five dollars a week that I pay you in salary. Every other expenditure is to be entered in that little book and shown to me.”
“I understand.”
“The first thing is to watch what you spend—and prove to me that you’ve got the common sense to profit by your mistake. The second and most important thing is that my wife and daughter are to have a good time.”
With the first of his salary Corcoran supplied himself with histories and guidebooks of Holland and Belgium, and on the night before their departure, as well as on the night of their arrival in Brussels, he sat up late absorbing a mass of information that he had never, in his travels with his mother, been aware of before. They had not gone in for sight-seeing. His mother had considered it something which only school-teachers and vulgar tourists did, but Mr. Bushmill had impressed upon him that Hallie was to have all the advantages of travel; he must make it interesting for her by keeping ahead of her every day.
In Brussels they were to remain five days. The first morning Corcoran took three seats in a touring bus, and they inspected the guild halls and the palaces and the monuments and the parks, while he corrected the guide’s historical slips in stage whispers and congratulated himself on doing so well.
But during the afternoon it drizzled as they drove through the streets and he grew tired of his own voice, of Hallie’s conventional “Oh, isn’t that interesting,” echoed by her mother, and he wondered if five days wasn’t too long to stay here after all. Still he had impressed them, without doubt; he had made a good start as the serious and well-informed young man. Moreover he had done well with the money. Resisting his first impulse to take a private limousine for the day, which would certainly have cost twelve dollars, he had only three bus tickets at one dollar each to enter in the little book. Before he began his nightly reading he put it down for Mr. Bushmill to see. But first of all he took a steaming hot bath—he had never ridden in a rubber-neck wagon with ordinary sightseers before and he found the idea rather painful.
The next day the tour continued, but so did the drizzling rain, and that evening, to his dismay, Mrs. Bushmill came down
