Page:Earl Derr Biggers - Seven Keys to Baldpate (1913).djvu/362

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340
SEVEN KEYS TO BALDPATE

smoked cigarettes and drank what passed for rum, on the balcony of an impossible hotel, and otherwise groped about for the path that leads to the devil. After a year, I wrote to Hayden. He answered, urging me to stay away. He intimated that the thing we had done was on my shoulders. I was ashamed, frightfully unhappy. I didn't dare write to—her. I had disgraced her. I asked Hayden about her, and he wrote back that she was shortly to marry him. After that I didn't want to come back to Reuton. I wanted most—to die.

"The years crept by on the balcony of that impossible hotel. Six of them. The first in bitter memories, memories of a red card that danced fiendishly before my eyes when I closed them—the last in a fierce biting desire to come back to the world I had left. At last, a few months ago, I wrote to another college friend of mine, Drayton, and told him the whole story. I did not know that he had been elected prosecutor in Reuton. He answered with a kind pitying letter—and finally I knew the horrible truth. Nothing had ever happened. The thing we had done had