“Oh, it’s all right—I’m her sister,” explained the other, in no wise resenting the ineffectual fabrications. She pushed forward past the reluctant girl with a resolute step, and put her hand on the knob of the tabooed door. “Make your mind quite easy, my dear,” she remarked over her shoulder, sinking her voice in turn in deference to the situation; “you’ve done all that could be expected of you—and I’ll tell her so.”
Then, with a momentary gleam of good nature on her pretty face, which the short transparent veil she wore to her chin seemed to accentuate rather than mask, she opened the door, threw up her head with a swift, puzzled glance at what she saw, and then tiptoed gracefully into the room, closing the door with painstaking noiselessness behind her.
Miss Frances Bailey entered her office not many minutes later, her cheeks aglow with the morning air as the wheelwoman meets it. She nodded cheerfully to Connie, and beyond her to the girls at the machines, as her hand sought for a hat-pin at the back of her head.
“Any word from the Lyceum?” she asked. “And what does that Zambesi-travel manuscript make?”
Connie ignored industrial topics. “There are people waiting in there to see you,” she announced, in low, significant tones.
The mistress was impressed by the suggestion of mystery. “People? What people?” she asked, knitting her brows.
“One of them says she’s your sister. And the other is a young gentleman—he came first—and he brought—”
“My sister?” interrupted Miss Bailey. “Cora! Something dreadful must have happened—for she never got out so early as this before in her life. Is she in mourning? Did she seem upset?”
“Not a bit of it!” said Connie, reassuringly. She added, following the other toward the private office: “I tried my best to keep her out here.”
“Why should you?” asked Frances, with wide-open eyes.