Frederick thought he had disposed of the matter, but the agent became offensive.
"Who are you, sir? My dealings are with Miss Hahlström exclusively. What right have you to mix in this affair?"
"I don't think I could dance to-night," Ingigerd interposed.
"You will lose that feeling as soon as you step on the stage. The manager's wife gave me a letter for you. Her maid is at the Astor with everything you need. She is entirely at your disposal."
"Our Petronilla is a jewel, too," Willy Snyders interjected. "If you tell her what you need, Miss Hahlström, she'll have it for you in five minutes." With the insistence of a seducer, he helped Ingigerd into the cab.
"Very well, then," said the agent emphatically, "you are breaking a contract, and I warn you of the consequences. I will have to ask you for your address."
Willy Snyders shouted a number on 107th street. The agent jotted it down in his note-book.
The cab with Ingigerd, Frederick, and Willy in it was transported from Hoboken to New York in the usual way, jammed in between other carriages and trucks on the ferry-boat. A newsboy on the ferry handed into the cab a copy of The Sun, with whole columns already describing the disaster. The authors of the information were probably the health officers and Captain Butor. When Willy Snyders began to speak of the Roland, Frederick checked him with a nod toward Ingigerd; but she had of herself noticed the report in the paper and asked if they had been the first to bring the news to New York.
"The Roland was overdue more than three days," Willy explained. "We were already beginning to be alarmed. Finally the passenger list from Bremen was published, and soon after your name, too, Doctor von Kammacher, appeared in the newspapers, your father in the meantime having cabled that you left Paris to catch the Roland at Southampton. I never lost faith that nothing but the wretched weather was delaying you, and I inquired at the steamship company's office every day. It was there that I learned of the sinking of the Roland and the arrival of the Hamburt with the first rescued passengers on board, with you among them." Noticing Ingigerd's sudden pallor, Willy added vivaciously, with apparent conviction, "A lot of others must surely have been rescued."
The amount of traffic, as indicated by an endless number of ferry-boats, tugs, and steamers of every sort, was immense. The ferry-boats, black with people, resembled floating towers of Babel, above which rose an iron something like a pump-handle, seesawing up and down with the invisible pistons.