“Me understand, honorable sir,” he admitted and pocketed the money.
CHAPTER XX
IDENTIFICATION
MARIAN VAN NESS turned restlessly away from the window as her old servant came into the sitting room.
“Are you quite sure no telephone call has come for me, Mammy?” she asked with gentle insistence. Mammy’s antipathy to the telephone was known to her; on occasions she had not answered it in Marian’s absence, having confided to the cook in the next apartment that it was little short of uncanny and she wanted nothing to do with the “devil’s works.”
“Aint been no call at all,” Mammy assured her with conviction. “I jes’ sat in my kitchen wif de do’ open alistenin’ fo’ dat and de do’ bell, as yo’ said yo’ was ’spectin’ company; aint eben been in hyar to tidy up.”
As she spoke Mammy proceeded to “set to rights,” as she termed it, the mass of books, electric light paraphernalia and torches which littered the window ledge and to put each chair in orderly array. Marian, who had kept a luncheon engagement of some days’ standing and returned afterward as promptly as possible to her apartment, moved away so that her old servant would not see the keen disappointment her statement of no callers and no telephone calls had given her.
Marian bitterly regretted the almost insane impulse which had prompted her to seek out Dan Maynard the night before, to even leave a note—a note he had ignored and left unanswered. Her cheeks burned at the thought.
The bang of a heavy book which Mammy inadvertently let fall startled her so that she dropped her ball of worsted which she was winding with the aid of a chair back. Mammy’s rheumatic joints cracked as she stooped over, but Marian was before her.
“Don’t bother, I’ll pick it up,” she said, and retrieving her ball, which had rolled under a table, she sat back somewhat flushed from her exertions, the book balanced open in her lap.
Looking more closely she saw it was an edition of “Who’s Who,” and in sheer idleness turned over its leaves as she continued winding the ball. Suddenly her eyes, traveling listlessly down one page, stopped, arrested by Dan Maynard’s name. Putting aside the worsted, she lifted up the book and read the long paragraph devoted to his accomplishments, his stage career, and his place of birth—Berlin.