“But,” began Nancy, “we promised——”
“We promised?” repeated the others.
“Yes. To Marie-Jeanne. Don’t ask what her reasons were, because we don’t know. But she made us promise that if she helped us we would not set the police on Miss Felicia Rivers.”
“Poor child! Poor young girl!” exclaimed Miss Campbell. “There is surely something back of it all. Her mother is a strange woman, but of course you must keep your word.”
Just then the telephone bell rang.
“That’s the Police Department now,” she continued. “I will answer it myself. Hello! Yes! This is Miss Campbell. Yes, they are safe with me now. They went to the wrong lodging house. It was all a mistake. No, a friend met them by chance and saved them. No complaints. Thank you for your courtesy.”
And so it happened that Miss Felicia Rivers and her friend, Thomas Dinwiddie, Dealer in Old Clothes, were not visited by justice at that time for their sins past or present.
The abode of Miss Letitia Lake was not called a lodging house at all, but by the much more high-sounding and finer title of “Westminster Chambers.” It had a perfect right to its name, for it was quite near to Westminster Abbey, whose twin towers might be seen from the windows of the upper chambers. It was a dignified, stately old house, once the home of a gentleman of title they were told, and was built of red brick, turned pink with age. A mantle of ivy clung to its walls, the growth of a century, perhaps, and the windows of the Campbell apartment looked out on an old garden already green with the touch of spring. There were three bedrooms of vast size furnished with fine old mahogany and faded hangings of another century, and a charming sitting room with long French windows opening upon little balconies over the street. The furniture in this room was modern; deep wicker chairs with bright chintz cushions were clustered around a fire of soft coals. Chintz curtains were at the windows and a dark red rug on the floor. The ceilings were very high, and the window recesses so deep that the girls wondered if the house had not been built to withstand shot and shell with those thick, solid walls.
It was in this room that the five kimonoed and slippered travelers assembled after hot baths of a refreshing and reanimating character.
The daintiest little red-cheeked maid brought in a tray much larger than she was, and deposited it on the center-table. The quaint old Canton china, the linen as white as snow, the fragrance of the most delicious tea ever tasted,—this soothed their senses; while toast, hot-buttered, just off the toaster, eggs hiding under a napkin, breakfast bacon, crisp and fragrant, and orange marmalade in a jar with a Scotch plaid pattern,—this was the breakfast which these five ladies, weary to the point of being a little light in the head, now proceeded to make away with to the last crumb.