“She would not know me,” she smiled, “I’m only a neighbor who used to know Murray when we were children. I had something to tell her I felt she perhaps would be glad to know.”
“Are you an agent? Because she won’t see agents.”
“Mercy no!” said Bessie, smiling. “Tell her I won’t keep her a moment. I would send a message if I could—but—I think I ought to speak with her.”
The merciless eye of the maid gave her one more searching look and sped away up the stairs again. A slight movement in a great room like a library across the wide, beautiful hall drew the girl’s attention, as if some one were over there listening. Perhaps it was Murray. Perhaps she was making a fool of herself. But it was too late now. She must see this thing through. It was always wrong to do a big thing like this on impulse. She ought to have talked it over with mother first. But she had prayed! And it had seemed so right, so impossible not to do it. Well, the maid was coming back.
“Madame says she can’t see you. She says she has no time to listen to complaints from the girls that hang on to her son. She says she remembers you now. You’re the girl she sent him away from to boarding school to get rid of years ago!”
“That will do, Marie!” said the stern voice of the master of the house. “You may go back to Mrs. Van Rensselaer!”
The maid gave a frightened glance behind her and sped away up the stairs in a hurry. The occasions were seldom when the master interfered with his wife’s servants, but when he did he did it thoroughly. Marie had no wish to incur his disfavor. Who could know the master was in that room?
Mr. Van Rensselaer came out from the shadow of the dimly lighted doorway and approached Bessie, eyeing her keenly.
“You had something to say about my son?” he asked in a courteous tone.
Bessie lifted eyes that were bright with unshed tears of wrath and mortification, but she answered firmly, and with a tone of dignity: