“Come with me, please, and show me your baggage.”
She went with him and felt herself growing stronger as she saw how cool and masterful he was, and how every one listened to him. Returning with her to the carriage, he said:
“Give me your keys, please. Those custom-house officers will ask for them. I will send you to the hotel, and join you there later.”
He spoke a few words to the driver, touched his hat to the ladies, and walked rapidly back to where bags and boxes were being opened, and brandy and tobacco and dynamite looked for by the officers.
Mrs. Grey was wholly bewildered and half unconscious when the carriage reached the hotel, from which a lackey came out, and was joined by one or two more when Louie gave the names, “Mrs. and Miss Grey.” The former was taken carefully into the house and up to the second floor to a large, airy room with which a smaller room communicated. A highly respectable-looking woman, who called herself Mrs. Brown, came in, and offered her services in getting Mrs. Grey into bed, where she dropped asleep at once.
Turning to Louie, the woman said: “If Miss will allow me, I will suggest that she, too, go to bed in the next room. You look wholly, utterly exhausted. I will sit with your mother till the gentleman comes.”
Louie shook her head, thinking she must wait till Mr. Lansing came, to know what it all meant. These handsome rooms she had not ordered, and this woman, whose attentions were almost obsequious was a puzzle to her. Was there a mistake and had she and her mother been taken for some distinguished and expected guests, and what would the people say, if they knew they were only the widow and daughter of a bankrupt?
“I must stay with mother,” she said, “and I don’t believe these rooms were meant for us.”
“Yes, they were,” the woman replied, “if you are Mrs. and Miss Grey, from America. The young gentleman was very particular about them. Your cousin, perhaps?”
Louie did not answer. Her head was in a whirl, and she felt so dizzy and faint and tired that she made no remonstrance when Mrs. Brown suggested again that she lie down in the next room.