"Thank you so much for telling him. Good-afternoon."
"You would like," the young man repeated—"but one moment, if you please. You have omitted to inform me who you are."
To his surprise the lady turned round with a gay laugh. Sharlee had supposed that Mr. Queed, having been offended by her, was deliberately cutting her. That her identity had literally dropped cleanly from his mind struck her as both much better and decidedly more amusing.
"Don't you remember me?" she reminded him once again, laughing full at him from the threshhold. "My dog knocked you over in the street one day—surely you remember the pleasure-dog?—and then that night I gave you your supper at Mrs. Paynter's and afterwards collected twenty dollars from you for back board. I am Mrs. Paynter's niece and my name is Charlotte Weyland."
Weyland?... Weyland? Oho! So this was the girl—sure enough—that Henry G. Surface had stripped of her fortune. Well, well!
"Ah, yes, I recall you now."
She thought there was an inimical note in his voice, and to pay him for it, she said with a final smiling nod: "Oh, I am so pleased!"
Her little sarcasm passed miles over his head. She had touched the spring of the automatic card-index system known as his memory and the ingenious machinery worked on. Presently it pushed out and laid before him the complete record, neatly ticketed and arranged, the full dossier, of all that had passed between him and the girl. But she was nearly through the door before he had decided to say:
"I had another letter from my father last night."
"Oh!" she said, turning at once—"Did you!"