“Can’t stop,” said James. “I’m in a great hurry. Have you got that note ready you wanted to send to the city?”
“I’ll get it in a moment. But you had better step in.”
“No, I can’t,” said James, not taking the trouble to acknowledge the invitation. “I am in a great hurry.”
Mrs. Raymond went back into her sitting-room, and speedily reappeared with the note and the pair of stockings wrapped in a brown paper.
“I am sorry to trouble you with this parcel,” she said. “Your father was so kind as to offer to carry it.”
“Umph!” muttered James, ungraciously.
“I am much obliged to him, and to you also for your trouble in coming around for it.”
James did not deign a reply, but, turning his back, marched off, feeling that he would rather have carried a bundle for any one than for Harry Raymond. If he could have known that at this very moment the boy whom he hated so intensely was speeding away from America, doing the duties of a sailor-boy, he would have felt compensated for the disagreeable nature of the favor he was so unwillingly doing.
Squire Turner went to the city the next day, as he proposed. He went round to the office in Nassau Street, temporarily occupied by Lemuel Fairchild, the address having been communicated to him by Mrs. Raymond, though this was hardly necessary, as Hartley Brandon had apprised him by letter of the details of the plot which they had mutually arranged. Of course he found it locked, and the tenant gone. The great commission house of Fairchild & Co. had mysteriously disappeared. In order to have something to report, he called at the next room.
“Can you tell me,” he asked, “whether Mr. Fairchild still occupies the adjoining room?”