“Then how—?”
“You see, it wasn’t the newspaper pictures I was thinking of, miss, but Dorothy Dixon herself. You see I know Miss Dixon,” she went on proudly, “and you two are certainly the spittin’ images of each other, if you don’t mind my saying so.”
Dorothy minded very much, but it was not consistent with the part she was playing to admit it. Here was a contretemps not even Ashton Sanborn had foreseen. Yet, of course, New Canaan was only ten miles away. She had many friends in Ridgefield, and she’d been there hundreds of times. But she simply couldn’t remember having seen Gretchen in any of their homes. Her answer was but a feeble stall for time.
“So you know her then?” she said lamely.
“Oh, yes, miss. Not well, you understand. I saw her and Mr. Bill Bolton first when they finished the endurance test on the Conway motor this fall. Then a few days later, I drove over to her house in our flivver—over to New Canaan, you know, and I called on Miss Dixon. I wanted her to autograph a picture of herself I’d cut out of the Sunday paper.”
“And you met her?” Dorothy remembered the incident perfectly now. But the maid’s uniform—and her hair—when she had seen her, Gretchen had worn two braids over her shoulders, very much the schoolgirl. No wonder she hadn’t recognized her. But now what should she do? Would it be possible to keep up this camouflage with a girl whom she had met and with whom she would come in daily contact? Gretchen was talking again.
“Yes indeed, I met her. And she was just darling to me, Miss Jordan. She even gave me one of her own photographs and wrote on it, too. You see, us Schmidts came over from Germany about a hundred years ago, but we’re honest-to-goodness Americans just the same. Father was in the American army during the war. He was an aviation mechanic. He found one of them Iron Crosses of the Germans on some battlefield in France and kept it for a mascot. And would you believe it, miss, Father never even got wounded once, the whole time he was over there! Perhaps it was the little Iron Cross, and perhaps it wasn’t. Anyway, he thought a lot of his mascot. When I was ten years old, he had it fixed on a thin gold chain for me to wear around my neck, and gave it to me on my birthday. Well, when I went to see Miss Dixon this fall, I took it with me. She goes up in her airplane so much and does so many other exciting things, I wanted her to have it. She didn’t want to take the cross at first, but I persuaded her to, just the same. And you don’t know how nice she was to me, Miss! Took me out to see Will-o-the-Wisp—that’s her plane, you know—she calls it Wispy for short. And I had a perfectly grand time. She’s my heroine, all right. And you, miss—I hope you’ll excuse me for talking so much about it—but you look exactly like her, and your voices are just the same, too. It’s wonderful!”
“So you are Margaret Schmidt,” Dorothy said slowly.
“Yes, miss, that is so, though everybody calls me Gretchen. How did you know my given name, Miss Jordan? Is Miss Dixon a friend of yours? Did she tell you about me? But that’s silly—she wouldn’t remember me.”
Dorothy looked the little maid straight in the eyes. “She remembers you, Gretchen. Would you be willing to do something for her—to keep a secret, a very important and maybe a dangerous one? Do you think you could do it?”