closer to his right shoulder. Before he opened the volume, however, he looked for a few moments steadfastly out across the sea of roofs, the network of telephone and telegraph wires, to where the lights of Broadway seemed to eat their way into the sky. Around him, the night life of the great city spread itself out in waves of gilded vice and black and sordid crime. Its many voices fell upon deaf ears. Until long past midnight, he sat engrossed in a scientific volume.
Chapter II
THE APARTMENT-HOUSE MYSTERY
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1.
“This habit of becoming late for breakfast,” Lady Ashleigh remarked, as she set down the coffee-pot, “is growing upon your father.”
Ella glanced up from a pile of correspondence through which she had been looking a little negligently.
“When he comes,” she said, “I shall tell him what Clyde says in his new play—that unpunctuality for breakfast and overpunctuality for dinner are two of the signs of advancing age.”
“I shouldn’t,” her mother advised. “He hates anything that sounds like an epigram, and I noticed that he avoided any allusion to his birthday last month. Any news, dear?”
“None at all, mother. My correspondence is just the usual sort of rubbish—invitations and gossip. Such a lot of invitations, by-the-bye.”
“At your age,” Lady Ashleigh declared, “that is the sort of correspondence which you should find interesting.”
Ella shook her head. She was a very beautiful young woman, but her expression was a little more serious than her twenty-two years warranted.
“You know I am not like that, mother,” she protested. “I have found one thing in life which interests me more than all this frivolous business of amusing oneself. I shall never be happy—not really happy—until I have settled down to study hard. My music is really the only part of life which absolutely appeals to me.”
Lady Ashleigh sighed.
“It seems so unnecessary,” she murmured. “Since Esther was married you are practically an only daughter, you are quite well off, and there are so many young men who want to marry you.”
Ella laughed gaily.
“That sort of thing may come later on, mother,” she declared—“I suppose I am only human like the rest of us—but to me the greatest thing in the whole world just now is music, my music. It is a little wonderful, isn’t it, to have a gift, a real gift, and to know it? Oh, why doesn’t Delarey make up his mind and let father know, as he promised! … Here comes daddy, mum. Bother! He’s going to shoot, and I hoped he’d play golf with me.”
Lord Ashleigh, who had stepped through some French windows at the farther end of the terrace, paused for a few minutes to look around him. There was certainly some excuse for his momentary absorption. The morning, although it was late September, was perfectly fine and warm. The cattle in the park which surrounded the house were already gathered under the trees. In the far distance, the stubble fields stretched like patches of gold to ridges of pine-topped hills, and beyond to the distant sea. The breakfast table at which his wife and daughter were seated was arranged on the broad grey stone terrace, and, as he slowly approached, it seemed like an oasis of flowers and fruit and silver. A footman stood discreetly in the background. Half a dozen dogs of various breeds came trotting forward to meet him. His wife, still beautiful notwithstanding her forty-five years, had turned her pleasant face towards him, and Ella, whom a great many Society papers had singled out as being one of the most beautiful débutantes of the season, was welcoming him with her usual lazy but wholly good-humoured smile.
“Daddy, your habits are getting positively disgraceful!” she exclaimed. “Mother and I have nearly finished—and our share of the post-bag is most uninteresting. Please come and sit down, tell us where you are going to shoot, and whether you’ve had any letters this morning?”
Lord Ashleigh loitered for a moment to raise the covers from the dishes upon a side table. Afterwards he seated himself in the chair which the servant was holding for him.
“I am going out for an hour or two with Fitzgerald,” he announced. “Partridges are scarcely worth shooting yet but he has arranged a few drives over the hills. As for my being late—well, that has something to do with you, young lady.”
Ella looked at him with a sudden seriousness in her great eyes.
“Daddy, you’ve heard something!”
Lord Ashleigh pulled a bundle of letters from his pocket.
“I have,” he admitted.
“Quick!” Ella begged. “Tell us all about it? Don’t sit there, dad, looking so stolid. Can’t you see I am dying to hear? Quick, please!”
Her father smiled, glanced for a moment at the plate which had been passed to him from the side table, approved of it and stretched out his hand for his cup.
“I heard this morning,” he said, “from your friend Delarey. He went into the matter very fully. You shall read his letter presently. The sum and substance of it all, however, is that for the first year of your musical training he advises—where do you think?”
“Dresden,” Lady Ashleigh suggested.
“Munich? Paris?” Ella put in breathlessly.
“All wrong,” Lord Ashleigh declared. “New York!”
There was a momentary silence. Ella’s eyes were sparkling. Her mother’s face had fallen.
“New York!” Ella murmured. “There is wonderful music there, and Mr. Delarey knows it so well.”
Lord Ashleigh nodded portentously.
“I have not finished yet. Mr. Delarey wound up his letter by promising to cable me his final decision in the course of a few days. This cablegram,” he went on, drawing a little slip of blue paper from his pocket, “was brought to me this morning whilst I was shaving. I found it a most inconvenient time, as the lather—”
“Oh, bother the lather, father!” Ella exclaimed. “Read the cablegram, or let me.”
Her father smoothed it out before him and read—
“To Lord Ashleigh, Hamblin House, Dorset, England.
“I find a magnificent programme arranged for at Metropolitan Opera House this year. Have taken box for your daughter, engaged the best professor in the world, and secured an
