The minister smiled at the irony, while scanning once more the pages of his little date-book. "To look in after prayer meeting about nine-thirty on Wednesday night would be my next opportunity, I should say," he reported presently.
"Wednesday!" complained Marien. "It is three eternities away. However," and her voice grew crisp with decision, "Wednesday night it shall be. In the meantime, do you speak anywhere? I shall attend the mother's meeting, if you will tell me where it is. I shall even come to prayer meeting; and," she concluded vivaciously; "you will be borne away by me triumphantly in my new French car, which was sent out here weeks and weeks ago to be tuned up and ready for my coming."
On Wednesday night Miss Dounay made good her word. When the little prayer-meeting audience emerged from the chapel room of All People's, it gazed wonderingly at a huge black shape on wheels that rested at the curb with two giant, fiery eyes staring into the night.
The old sexton, looking down from the open doorway, saw his pastor shut into this luxurious equipage with two strange women, for Marien was properly accompanied by Julie, and nodded his head with emphatic approval.
"Some errand of mercy," he mumbled with fervency. "Brother Hampstead is the most helpful man in the world."
Nor was this the last appearance of Marien Dounay's shining motor-car before the door of All People's. It was seen also in front of the palm-surrounded cottage on the bay front, where John Hampstead lived with his sister, Rose, and the children, and enjoyed, at times, some brief seclusion from his busy, pottering life of general helpfulness.
Once the car even stopped before the home of the Angel of the Chair, perhaps because Hampstead had told Marien casually that of all women Mrs. Burbeck had alone been consistently able to understand him, and the actress wished to learn her secret. But the Angel of the Chair, while quite unabashed by the glamour of the actress-presence, nevertheless refused entirely to be drawn into talk about Brother Hampstead, who was usually the most enthusiastic subject of her conversation. Instead she spent most of the time searching the depths of Miss Dounay's baffling eyes with a look from her own luminous orbs, half-apprehensive and half-appealing, that made the caller exceedingly uncomfortable; so that Marien would have accounted the visit fruitless and even unpleasant, if she had not, while there, chanced to meet the young man known to fortune and the social registers as Rollo Charles Burbeck.
Rollo was the darling son of the Angel and the pride of the Elder's heart. Tall, blond, handsome, and twenty-eight, endowed with his mother's charm of manner and a certain mixture of the coarse practicality and instinct for leadership which his father possessed, the young man had come to look upon himself as a sort of favorite of the fickle goddess for whom nothing could be expected to fall out otherwise than well. Without money and without prestige, in fact, without much real ability, and more because as a figure of a youth he was good to look upon and possessed of smooth amiability, Rollie, as his friends and his doting mother called him, had risen through the lower rounds of the Amalgamated National to be one of its assistant cashiers and a sort of social handy-man to the president, very much in the sense that this astute executive had political handy-men and business handy-men in the capacity of directors, vice-presidents, and even minor official positions in his bank.
But there were, nevertheless, some grains of sand in the bearings of Rollo's spinning chariot wheels.
In his capacity as an Ambassador to the Courts of Society, he had the privilege of leaving the bank quite early in the afternoon, when his presence at some daylight function might give pleasure to a hostess whose wealth or influence made her favor of advantage to the Amalgamated National. He might sometimes place himself and a motor-car at the disposal of a distinguished visitor from outside the city, might dine this visitor and wine him, might roll him far up the Piedmont Heights, and spread before his eye that wonderful picture of commercial and industrial life below, clasped on all sides by the blue breast and the silvery, horn-like arms of the Bay of San Francisco.