A new name

A NEW NAME
BY GRACE LIVINGSTON HILL AUTHOR OF MARCIA SCHUYLER, NOT UNDER THE LAW, ARIEL CUSTER, Etc.
GROSSET & DUNLAP PUBLISHERS NEW YORK
COPYRIGHT, 1925-26, BY THE CHRISTIAN ENDEAVOR WORLD COPYRIGHT, 1926, BY J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
A NEW NAME
Murray Van Rensselaer had been waiting for an hour and a quarter in the reception-room of the Blakeley Hospital.
He was not good at waiting. Things usually came at his call, or sometimes even anticipated his desires. It was incredible that he should suddenly find himself in such a maddening set of circumstances!
He still wore the great fur-lined overcoat in which he had arrived after the accident, but he seemed to be unaware of it as he paced excitedly up and down the stark leather-upholstered room.
Across the marble corridor he could just see the tip of white starched linen that was the cap of the uniformed person with double-lensed spectacles who sat at the roll-top desk and presided over this fiendish place.
Three times he had pranced pompously across the tessellated floor and demanded to know what had become of the patient he had brought in. She had only looked him over coldly, impersonally, and reiterated that word would be sent to him as soon as the examination was completed. Even his name, which he had condescendingly mentioned, had failed to make the slightest impression upon her. She had merely filed his immaculate calling card and remanded him to the reception-room.
The tall clock in the corner, the only live thing in the room, seemed to tick in eons, not seconds. He regarded it belligerently. Why should a clock seem to have eyes that searched to your soul? What was a clock doing there anyway, in a place where they regarded not time, and were absorbed in their own terrible affairs? The clock seemed to be the only connecting-link with the outside world.