“Has he got Mr. Benton with him?”
“Yes, Miss Webster. An’ there’s somebody else, too.”
“That’s good. Show Mr. Benton right up here. You needn’t wait. I’ll call you when I need you. Let the other man sit in the kitchen ’til we want him.”
Whatever the mysterious business was, it took no great while, for before an hour had passed Melvina, waiting in the hall outside the chamber door, heard a shrill summons.
“You can come in now, Melviny,” Ellen said. “There’s something here I want you should put your name to; an’ you can fetch that man who’s downstairs, an’ Tony.”
“All right.”
When, however, a few seconds later Melvina, accompanied by the stranger and the wondering Portuguese boy, entered the patient’s room, it was Mr. Benton who stepped into the foreground and who came obsequiously forward, pen in hand, to address the attendant.
“The paper which you are about to sign, 241 Miss Grey,” he began pompously, “is——” But Ellen cut short his peroration.
“It don’t make no difference to Melviny what it is, Mr. Benton,” she said impatiently. “All she’s got to do is to watch me write my name, an’ then put hers down where you tell her, together with Tony an’ the other witness. That will end it.”
“But don’t you think, Miss Webster, that in justice to Miss Grey, you should inform her——”