Again the question rose: how was it all coming out?
The next afternoon Clifford, following Hilton, saw his quarry enter the Mordona, the great apartment house on the Drive before which he had left Mary the night before. He followed into the lobby just as his man disappeared into an elevator. He had no doubt on whom the dark gentleman was calling, or for what reason he called.
Opening into the elaborate lobby, for whose gilded ostentation the tenants were assessed a goodly portion of their rent, was a florist’s shop. Into the comparative privacy of this Clifford stepped to wait until his man came down: a move that was just in time, for from a descended elevator, which must have passed the one bearing Hilton aloft, stepped the square, solid figure of Bradley. Again Clifford had no doubt on whom the call had been made, or why.
At last he had picked up a warm and very busy trail. Under pretense of an indecision over the flowers he should purchase, he waited for his man to come down, trying to reproduce the scene that was now going on in the “Graysons’” apartment, and the scene prior to it in which Bradley had figured. A quarter of an hour passed, then the debonair Hilton emerged from an elevator and strode out with a jaunty, smiling air.
The next moment Clifford was in an elevator, shooting upward, and two minutes later Mary’s maid was bearing his card through a curtained doorway. He caught Mary’s voice sounding as though it were two rooms away, finishing what was obviously a telephone conversation: “You’ll come as soon as you can get here? That’s most kind of you. Good-bye.”
There was a delay; he guessed that Mary was surprised at this third successive call; then he was shown through the curtained doorway into the drawing-room. His swift impression of the room was that it was large for a New York apartment, and that its prodigal furnishings bespoke wealth rather than taste on the part of its absent lessee. The next moment Mary came in through a door which he judged led from the library. There was now in her bearing nothing of the cold frankness which she had shown him the day before. She was taut with controlled excitement, which he knew to be the product of the so recent interviews. Her manner was challenging.
“What do you want?”
He tried to speak in a steady, impersonal tone. “Mr. Bradley was here a few minutes ago. I’d be obliged if you’d tell me what he came for.”
“Pardon me for not obliging you—but that is my own affair. Is this all?”
“Another gentleman just called on you. Would you tell me what he wanted?”