"Why does Mr. Ford call this the surgery?"
At the mention of the managing clerk Iola brightened up and said with a smirk:
"Because it's where Miss Whitehall chloroforms her clients with her beauty and performs the operation of separating them from their money. He's always saying cute things like that."
We stood in the doorway and looked in. It was a smaller room than the others, but furnished just as richly, with a mahogany center table, big leather-covered armchairs and photographs of foreign views on the walls. In one corner was an elegant, gold-embossed screen, that, when I spied behind it, I saw hid a washstand. It was the last room of the suite and had only one door that led into the office we'd been sitting in. In the outside wall was a window from which you could see way over the city—a wonderful view.
I walked to it and looked out. Over the roofs and chimneys I caught a glimpse of the Hudson, a silvery gleam, and the Hoboken hills beyond. Pressing my forehead against the glass I glimpsed down the sheer drop of the walls to the roof of a church—a flat, black oblong with a squatty dome at one end—squeezed as close as it could get against the lower stories. Back of that were old houses, dwellings that would soon be swept away, the yards behind them narrow strips with the separating fences as small as lines made by a pencil.
I was so interested that for a moment I forgot Iola, but she brought me back with a jerk.
"It was in the room above this that Mr. Harland was sitting with Mr. Barker, before it happened."
"You don't say," I answered. "Is it like this?"
"Exactly the same. I've seen it—one day when the boss was away and I went up with Della Franks. They were in there just as we are in here and then he went out this way—"
The door had been partly pushed to and she started to illustrate how he had left the room, brushing round its edge. Something caught her, there was a sound of ripping and she stopped, clapping her hand on her back: