Katherine rose with alacrity and put on her hat and coat. “Any errands while I am in town?” she asked, hunting for her umbrella in the stair closet.
“None that I can think of,” replied Nyoda, after wrinkling her brow for a moment, “unless you want to stop at the jeweller’s and get my watch. It’s been there for several weeks, being regulated.”
“All right,” said Katherine, writing down the name of the jeweller in her memorandum book. “You’ll notice I’m not trusting my memory this time,” she remarked laughingly.
“I’ll take the five-fifteen train back,” she called over her shoulder as she went out of the front door.
“Be careful how you hold that package!” Nyoda called warningly after her. “There’s a glass of jelly in it that’ll upset!”
Gingerly holding the package by the string, Katherine picked her way through the rapidly widening puddles on the sidewalks to the station. By some miracle of good luck the package was still right side up when she arrived at the hospital, and she breathed an audible sigh of relief when it was at last safely out of her hands.
She found Mrs. Deane a frail, kindly-faced woman, bearing her discomfort cheerfully, but, nevertheless, lonesome in this strange hospital ward and very grateful for any attention shown her. Katherine began, as she described it, to “express her sympathy quietly and in a ladylike manner,” and ended up by delivering her famous “Wimmen’s Rights” speech for the benefit of the whole ward. She finally escaped, after her sixth encore, and fetched up breathless on the sidewalk, only to discover that she had left her umbrella behind, and before she retrieved it she had to give her speech all over again, for the benefit of an old lady who had been asleep during the first performance.
There still being three-quarters of an hour before train time after she had called at the jewellers for Nyoda’s watch, Katherine dropped into a smart little tea-room to while away the intervening moments with a cup of tea and a dish of her favorite shrimp salad. As she nibbled leisurely at a dainty round of brown bread and idly watched the throngs coming and going at the tables around her, a shrill cry of delight suddenly rang out above the hum of voices and the clatter of dishes.
“Katherine! Katherine Adams!”
Katherine looked up to see an animated little figure in a beaver coat and fur hat coming toward her through the crowd.