She was considerably annoyed by it. She was also annoyed by the detective's presumption in coming to see her, and when he did arrive she confronted him with a cool and haughty stare.
Yet she was slightly curious with regard to him. The whole criminal world was unknown to her, but it possessed a strange fascination for her, and this small experience had convinced her that she would have made an excellent detective herself, one better qualified by nature than this puffy, red-faced individual, gasping for breath in the cool library.
He was by no means her ideal of a detective. She had imagined that he would be tall and lean, a serpentine kind of a man, capable of twisting himself into innumerable Protean shapes, whereas he was short and stout, and of a fiery redness of complexion.
How could he ever disguise those cheeks of alarming hue, those sausages of arms and posts of legs? She did not like him. It irritated her to have him sit gazing at her with his moist, gooseberry-coloured eyes, while he mopped his perspiring face with a new handkerchief stiff with the creases in which it had come out of some second-rate Boston store.
She was in haste to get him away from the house. Her aunt might return unexpectedly, and her restless curiosity would be sure to result in disagreeable discoveries, therefore she opened the conversation by saying, "If we are interrupted and you are questioned, I wish you would let it be supposed that you are some one in search of employment."
"All right," he said, with an unctuous laugh, and twisting his head all around his shoulders in order to reach the regions of neck behind. "I ought to apologise for being here, but I had something to communicate,—something I wouldn't trust to no letter."
The reserved young lady vouchsafed him no reply; and, restoring his handkerchief to its proper place, he took up the tone of their correspondence, and went on, briskly, "Yours of the tenth was duly received."
"Indeed," said Chelda, as calmly as if it were a matter of surprise that her letter should not have gone astray.
"I filled your little commission about the key, but that ain't what brought me here," and he immediately inflated his whole body in a manner that betokened a high state of gratification.
"What did bring you?" inquired Chelda, with an impatient desire to bring him to the point.