A dozen years before, Mrs. De Peyster, then in the fifth year of her widowhood, had graciously undertaken to manage and underwrite the début of her second cousin (not of the main line, be it said) and had tried to discharge her duty in the important matter of securing her a husband. But her efforts had been futile, and to say that Mrs. De Peyster had not succeeded was to admit that poor Olivetta Harmon was indeed a failure. She had lacked the fortune to attract the conservative investor who is looking for a sound business proposition in her he promises to support; she had lacked the good looks to lure on the lover who throws himself romantically away upon a penniless pretty face; and she had not been clever enough to attract the man so irrationally bold as to set sail upon the sea of matrimony with a woman of brains. And so, her brief summer at an end, she had receded to those remote and undiscovered shores on which dwell the poor relations of the Four Hundred; whereon she had lived respectably, as a lady (for that she should ever appear a lady was due the position of Mrs. De Peyster), upon an almost microscopic income; and from which bleak and distant land of second-cousindom she came in glad and proud obedience to fill an occasional vacant place at one of Mrs. De Peyster's second-best dinner parties.
She had arrived but the moment before to bid her exalted cousin adieu and wish her bon-voyage, and was now silently gazing in unenvious admiration at the jewels Mrs. De Peyster was transferring to their traveling-cases—with never a guess that perturbation might exist beneath her kinswoman's composed exterior. As a matter of fact, under the trying circumstances which confronted Mrs. De Peyster, any other household would have been in confusion, any lesser woman might have been headed toward hysteria. But centuries of having had its own will had established the De Peyster habit of believing that things would eventuate according to the De Peyster wish; it was not in the De Peyster blood to give way. And yet, though self-control might restrain worry from the surface, it could not banish it from the private chambers of her being.
Mrs. De Peyster glanced at the open door of her bedroom—hesitated—then called: "Miss Gardner!"
A trim and pretty girl stepped in. "Yes, Mrs. De Peyster."
"Will you please call up Judge Harvey's office once more, and inquire if there is any news about my son. And ask when Judge Harvey will be here."
Miss Gardner crossed to Mrs. De Peyster's desk and took up the telephone.
"Why, Cousin Caroline, has Jack—"
"One moment, Olivetta,"—motioning toward the telephone,—"until Miss Gardner is through."
They sat silent until the receiver was hung up. Mrs. De Peyster strove to keep anxiety from her voice.
"Well, Miss Gardner,—any trace of my son yet?"