“Miss Evelyn’s gone to her room,” he confided to her. “And the master’s out. Shall I bring a cup of tea to your room, Mrs. Van Ness?”
“No, thanks, Jones, it is too near dinner time,” and Marian, not glancing inside the drawing room door as she passed down the hall, mounted the staircase to the second floor. She went at once to Evelyn’s room, and to her disappointment found it empty. Pausing undecidedly at the door, she finally crossed the hall to her bedroom and, taking off her hat, wasted no time in dressing for dinner.
It was still lacking fifteen minutes to the dinner hour when she returned to Evelyn’s bedroom; its occupant was still absent, and Marian hesitated whether to go downstairs or into the library. Finally deciding in favor of the latter course she walked down the hall, and parting the portières, stepped into the room. A man bending over an open drawer of the desk straightened up at her approach and she recognized Dan Maynard.
“Good evening,” he exclaimed, and the cordial ring in his voice found its accompaniment in the quick lighting of his eyes as he looked at her. “Don’t go,” as murmuring a polite greeting, she started to leave.
“Am I not disturbing your occupation?” she asked.
Maynard laughed softly. “My occupation consists at the moment in searching for writing paper,” he acknowledged, pushing back a lot of loose papers and some string in the drawer. “Do take this chair,” and he wheeled one forward.
Marian settled down in the depths of the big chair with a sigh of content; she had had no rest the night before, the work at the State Department had been exacting, and while the walk home had for the moment refreshed her, she was more weary than she at first realized.
“I thought I saw you motoring with Dr. Hayden and Jim Palmer,” she remarked, after waiting for Maynard to break the silence.
“He gave me a lift as far as the Connecticut Avenue telegraph office.” Maynard looked down at his business suit and then at her becoming evening dress. “I must apologize for not dressing for dinner,” he said. “The fact is I left England so hurriedly that my luggage is still in London. The clerk in the shipping office, when I went to inquire when the next Cunarder would sail, whispered in my ear that she was leaving that afternoon and I had just time to make the boat but could not go back to collect my belongings.”
“Was your trip across uneventful?” she questioned, noting with inward approval his tall, well-knit form and broad shoulders.