To avoid the leering elevator man the two girls climbed the six flights to the seventh floor. Pat carried the letter. Gyp agreed to go in first.
"746—748——" read Pat.
"It's the other corridor." They retraced their steps to the other side of the building. "784-788-792——" Gyp repeated the office numbers aloud. "7-9-6! Wilbur Stratman, Undertaker!"
"Pat Everett!" Gyp clutched her chum's arm. "A—undertaker! I won't go in—for all the Miss Grays in the world!"
Pat was seized with such a fit of giggling that she had difficulty in speaking, even in a whisper. "Isn't that funny? We've got to go in. The girls are waiting—we'd never hear the last of it! He can't bury us alive. Oh, d-dear——" She wadded her handkerchief to her lips and leaned against the wall.
"If Miss Gray wants an undertaker she can have him! For my part I should think she'd rather have a policeman or—or the iceman! Come on——" Gyp's face was comical in its disgust. She turned the knob of the door.
A thin, sad-faced woman told them that Mr. Stratman was in his office. She eyed them curiously as, with a jerk of her head, she motioned them through a little gate. As Gyp with trembling fingers opened the door of the inner office, a man with a noticeable white streak in his hair pulled his feet down from his desk, dropped a cigar on his pen tray and reached for a coat that lay across another chair.
"Is—is this Mr. Stratman?" asked Gyp, wishing her tongue would not cling to the roof of her mouth.
He nodded and waited. These young girls were not like his usual customers, probably they had some sort of a subscription blank with them. He watched warily.
"Our errand is—is private," stumbled Gyp, who could see that Pat was beyond the power of speech. "It's—it's personal. We've come, in fact, of—our own accord—she doesn't know a thing about it——"