Her face, per se, was fine, aristocratic, and Bostonian of cast; so now you can get a pretty fair idea of Miss Henrietta Webb’s appearance. She had long arms, long fingers, long legs, and—if it interests you at all—long toes. She was that sort, you know, and those long limbs and digital extremities fairly shout a psychic nature. Which she had.
Her voice was charming. It had that indescribable, inimitable timbre,—that only New England birth bestows; and those wonderful inflections never inborn save in Massachusetts.
This voice and these inflections now sounded over the telephone, like the sound of a grand Hello!
For Miss Webb was too truly correct, too innately proper to descend to the silly subterfuges of “Yes?” or “What is it?” affected by the would-be refined.
But her “Hello,” with her inflection, was like the benediction that follows after prayer,—or like the harmonious echo of this discordant life.
“Hello!” returned Fenn Whiting, in his cheery way. “How are you? How’s old Kimmy?”
“Can you come up here right away?” asked Miss Webb, and catching the serious note in her voice, Whiting replied, “Why, yes; in a few minutes. What’s up?”
“I don’t want to talk over the telephone,” she informed him, “but do get here as soon as you possibly can.”
She hung up the receiver, which was her efficacious way of decreeing the conversation at an end.
“Mother,” she said, rising, “we may as well eat our breakfast. Thank Heaven we’re not the sort of people who fly into hysterics. I admit if I were that sort I should certainly do so, though, for this mystery is baffling me. I feel my brain reel when I try to think it out! Whatever the explanation of Kimball’s absence, no power on earth can explain how he got out of his room.”