He sent off the message to Bobby Burns without delay, and despatched another to Leaver, announcing their arrival that evening. In two hours more they were on their way, and at six o'clock they were met in the Baltimore station by Leaver himself.
"See the old chap grin!" said Burns in his wife's ear, when they descried the tall figure in the distance, coming toward them with smiling face and alert step. "Can that be the desperately down person who came to us last June? He looks as if—in a perfectly quiet way—he owned the city of Baltimore!"
"How well, how splendidly well, he looks!" Ellen agreed.
Then they were shaking hands with Dr. John Leaver and listening to his hearty greeting:
"This is great of you two—great. We certainly appreciate it. Come, I'll have you at home before you know it. Charlotte is waiting with the warmest welcome you will find on this side of the Atlantic!"
He hurried them away, but not so fast that Red Pepper Burns did not find time to chuckle: "The power of association is beginning to tell already, Jack. That was the most impetuous speech I ever heard from your lips. I don't call such language really restrained—not from you."
Leaver turned, laughing, to Ellen. "One would think I had been the most solemn fellow known to history," said he.
In two minutes he had bestowed his guests in a small but luxuriously appointed closed car, had given the word to his chauffeur, and had taken his place facing them. Burns examined the landau's interior with interest.
"The evidence of a slight but unmistakable odour tells me that this is the jewel-box in which Baltimore's gem of a surgeon keeps his appointments," said he. "Well, the Green Imp's beginning to show traces of her age, but her successor will be no aristocrat of this type. I'd rather drive myself and freeze my face to a granite image than be transported in cotton-wool, like this."
Leaver and Ellen laughed at his expression.