Her knees were shaking under her and her heart was beating tumultuously as she stepped into the offices of "Slater & Slater," and inquired for the senior member of that firm.
A chubby-faced office-boy, opening envelopes with a sharp steel paper-knife, was the only person to be seen. Mr. Slater had not come down yet; would not be there before half-past nine. Would she wait, and, if so, would she take a chair.
Cordelia could not wait; she left word that she would be back in half an hour, with a request that Mr. Slater keep himself disengaged until she saw him, as her business was most important. It was, indeed, vital, she tried to impress on the boy, who seemed, nevertheless, to give more attention to his envelopes than to his visitor.
Once back in her cab she instructed the driver to turn up the avenue and drive as far as the Plaza and back. At Twenty-ninth Street, in response to a sudden whim, she called out for him to turn east, and as her motor-cab slowly glided past the Church of the Transfiguration, the Little Church Around the Corner, she looked with veiled yet with curiously alert eyes at that diminutive edifice, at the ivy on the walls, at the garden-like greenness between its doors and the street, at the Gothic arches showing through bare tree-branches, and at the little roofed gateway, through which so many happy hearts, in their time, had passed out and been forgotten.
Would it be too late, she asked herself again, with a sudden, new-born passion of restlessness.
Mr. Henry Slater received Cordelia with a smile that was both conciliating and commiserative. This was partly because of the firm line of her thin and tightly closed lips and a latent fire that shone in her eyes, and partly because of the ghastliness of her pale and worn and withered face, as she stood between him and the chair he had blandly put out for her to take.
"You received my telegram?" she asked, her voice dry, trembling in spite of herself.
"Yes, I did," he answered, suavely, "but not, unfortunately, until this morning. I leave the office at four in the afternoon, you know, and every Thursday I am at our printing-plant at Newark. But in connection with your wire, Miss Vaughan, while——"
"Have you done what I asked?"