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The Girl in His House
By HAROLD MacGRATH
Author of "The Luck of the IRISH"
Copyright, 1918, by Harper & Brothers
The Girl in His House
CHAPTER I
ARMITAGE had come thirteen thousand miles--across deserts, through jungles, over snow-clad peaks--as fast as camels and trains and ships could carry him, driven by an all-compelling desire Sixty-odd days ago he had been in the amber-mines in the Hukainng Valley, where Upper Burma ends and western China begins; and here he was, riding up old Broadway--a Broadway that twinkled and glittered and glared with the same old colored clock lights. Men were queer animals. He had sworn never to set foot inside of New York again.
A paragraph in a New York newspaper, a sheet more than a year old and fallen to the base usage of wrapping-paper and protecting temporarily a roll of pudgy Burmese cheroots from the eternal mold of the middle Orient, had started him upon this tremendous, swinging journey. A thousand times he had perused that paragraph. Frayed and tattered to the point of disintegration, the clipping now reposed in his wallet. He no longer disturbed it; it wasn't necessary; he knew it by heart and could recite it word for word:
JOHN SANDERSON, the multi-millionaire packer, died yesterday at his summer home on Lake Michigan. He was sixty-nine years old.
The woman who had jilted Armitage was a widow.
Curious thing! He had come down from the top of the world, as it were, shamelessly, a flame in his heart that resembled a torch in the wind. So long as he pressed down through the jungles and