"I'll go down to Patchin Place myself. I'd like to see their faces when I tell them!" he declared aloud, with a tingle within his heart that was a thrill although the little man did not know it.
Harkness coughed behind him. He turned quickly. Harkness bowed stiffly. "Madame awaits you in the drawing-room."
The little man-of-the-law's chin went out. "Madame awaits—" Poor old Madame; she would not have known how to come in and say "Let us go out to dinner." There had to be all the ceremony and fuss—or it would not have been Gray Manor and Madame Christopher Forsyth.
"All right. I'll find her," Mr. Allendyce growled. Then he was startled out of his usual composure by catching the suggestion of a twinkle in the Harkness eye which, of course, should not be in a Forsyth butler's eye at all.
CHAPTER IV
RED-ROBIN
For twenty-five years Cornelius Allendyce had worn nothing but black ties. On the morning of his contemplated invasion of Patchin Place in search of a Forsyth heir he knotted a lavender scarf about his neck and felt oddly excited. Such a sudden and unexplainable impulse, he thought, must portend adventure.
With a notion that all artists were "at home" at tea time, Mr. Allendyce waited until four o'clock before he approached his agreeable task. At the door of 22 Patchin Place he dismissed his taxicab and stood for a moment surveying the dilapidated front of the building—with a moment's mental picture of the magnificent pile that was Gray Manor.