By that time Bella had seen how handsome he was, and she took a hair pin
out of her mouth, and arched her eyebrows, which was always Bella's best
pose.
"I am Miss Knowles," she said sweetly (of course, the court had given
her back her name), "and I stopped in tonight, thinking the house
was empty, to see about a--a butler. Unfortunately, the house was
quarantined just at that time, and--here I am. Surely there can not be
any harm in helping me to get out?" (Pleading tone.) "I have not been
exposed to any contagion, and in the exhausted state of my health the
confinement would be positively dangerous."
She rolled her eyes at him, and I could see she was making an
impression. Of course she was free. She had a perfect right to marry
again, but I will say this: Bella is a lot better looking by electric
light than she is the next morning.
The upshot of it was that the gentleman who built bridges and looked
down on society from a lofty, lonely pinnacle agreed to help one of the
most gleaming members of the aforesaid society to outwit the law.
It took about fifteen minutes to quiet the policeman. Nobody ever knew
what Mr. Harbison did to him, but for twenty-four hours he was quite
tractable. He changed after that, but that comes later in the story.
Anyhow, the Harbison man went upstairs and came down with a Bagdad
curtain and a cushion to match, and took them into the furnace room,
and came out and locked the door behind him, and then we were ready for
Bella's escape.
But there were four special officers and three reporters watching the
house, as a result of Max Reed's idiocy. Once, after trying all the
other windows and finding them guarded, we discovered a little bit of a
hole in an out-of-the-way corner that looked like a ventilator and was
covered with a heavy wire screen. No prisoners ever dug their way out of
a dungeon with more energy than that with which we attached that screen,
hacking at it with kitchen knives, whispering like conspirators, being
scratched with the ragged edges of the wire, frozen with the cold air
one minute and boiling with excitement the next. And when the wire was
cut, and Bella had rolled her coat up and thrust it through and was
standing on a chair ready to follow, something outside that had looked
like a barrel moved, and said, "Oh, I wouldn't do that if I were you.
It would be certain to be undignified, and probably it would be
unpleasant--later."
We coaxed and pleaded and tried to bribe, and that happened, as it
turned out, to be one of the worst things we had to endure. For the
whole conversation came out the next afternoon in the paper, with the
most awful drawings, and the reporter said it was the flashing of the
jewels we wore that first attracted his attention. And that brings me
back to the robbery.