“Can I see your father?” she asked.
“I am sorry, he is not in,” Duncan sprang up and pushed forward a chair. “Won’t I serve the purpose?”
“Oh, yes.” She stepped forward and removed a small roll of bank notes from her muff. “Janet cashed one hundred and fifty dollars for your father, and asked me to give it to him. Will you see that the money reaches him?” placing the bank notes on the library table. “I’m afraid I can’t sit down, Mr. Fordyce; your sister is waiting for me.”
“Let her wait,” calmly. “It’s beastly cold outside; I am sure the fire will be a comfort. Sit down for a moment.”
“I mustn’t,” Marjorie’s color, made brilliant by the wind outside, deepened to a warmer tint as she caught his eyes. “Janet and Baron von Valkenberg are waiting in the motor for me; we are going down to the Basin to skate. The river is frozen over, you know. Good-bye,” and she vanished through the doorway.
“D—mn! they might have asked me to go along!” Duncan threw a fresh log on the fire as a slight vent to his feelings, then strolled over to the window opening on Sheridan Circle. He was just in time to see Marjorie assisted into the waiting motor by Chichester Barnard.
Duncan drew back, stung to the quick, and making his way to the table, dropped into his father’s revolving chair. For a time he sat blindly scratching marks on a pad, then threw down his pencil in disgust.
“The only woman!” he muttered, and his clenched hands parted slowly. As he rose to leave the room his eyes fell on a small pile of bank notes lying on the floor where he had knocked them some minutes before. He gathered them up, and paused idly to count the bills.... “Nine tens, ten tens, one hundred; one ten——” his hand remained suspended in the air; surely Marjorie had mentioned one hundred and fifty dollars? Where was the odd forty? He went slowly over the bills again, with the same result—one hundred and ten dollars.
With infinite pains Duncan searched the table and then the floor. Leaving the library he went carefully down the hall and staircase, and from there to the front door and down to the street. Finding no trace of any bank notes, he retraced his steps to the house, but instead of mounting the stairs he went up in the lift, first carefully examining its interior. On reaching the drawing-room floor he returned to the library and sat for some time contemplating the fire. The tinkle of the telephone bell aroused him, and he hastened to remove the receiver.
“Yes, this is Duncan Fordyce,” he called. “Yes, Janet, what is it?”