“You couldn’t possibly make the next train, sir; it leaves in a few moments.”
“I tell you you must make it!” cried Basil Hurlhurst. “Go and do as I bid you at once! Don’t stand there staring at me; you are losing golden moments. Fly at once, I tell you!”
Poor old Mason was literally astounded. What had come over his kind, courteous master?
“I have nothing that could aid them in the search,” he said to himself, pacing restlessly up and down the room. “Ah! stay!––there is Evalia’s portrait! The little one must look like her mother if she is living yet!”
He went to his writing-desk and drew from a private drawer a little package tied with a faded ribbon, which he carefully untied with trembling fingers.
It was a portrait on ivory of a beautiful, girlish, dimpled face, with shy, upraised blue eyes, a smiling rosebud mouth, soft pink cheeks, and a wealth of rippling, sunny-golden hair.
“She must look like this,” he whispered. “God grant that I may find her!”
“Mr. Rex Lyon says, please may he see you a few moments, sir,” said Mason, popping his black head in at the door.
“No; I do not wish to see any one, and I will not see any one. Have you that satchel packed, I say?”