"You can go and find out. Mr. What's-his-name can tell you, even if it isn't his company that will have to pay."
And in this way it came about that Helen found herself, not many days later, descending from the Elevated Station at Cortlandt Street, and turning her steps eastward toward William Street. It was half-past ten when she found herself before a portal on which were the words: The Guardian Fire Insurance Company of the City of New York.
Intrusting herself to the deliberate conveyance of the elevator, she arrived eventually at the top floor, and to a clerk near the door she expressed her desire to see Mr. James Wintermuth. One of the principal assets of this employee was his readiness to assume an expression, when any one inquired for the President, suggestive that in his opinion such a desire could scarcely be expected by the visitor to be gratified, and he was also supposed to decide by inquiry or intuition whether he should so far intrude on Mr. Wintermuth's privacy as to present the stranger's name. He had come to be uncommonly adept at this, but the spectacle of this dark-eyed young woman was quite beyond the gamut of his routine experience. In a sort of charmed coma he surveyed the visitor, and found himself starting to inform the President of her arrival without a preliminary inquisition even to the extent of inquiring the nature of her business with that gentleman. Accordingly, after the briefest of intervals she found herself ushered into the office of an elderly gentleman who rose courteously to welcome her.
"Miss Maitland, I think. You are the niece of Silas Osgood of Boston?" he inquired. "Mr. Osgood wrote that I might expect to see you here."
The girl handed him the letter.
"Here are my credentials," she said, with a smile. "I am also an envoy extraordinary from my aunt, Miss Wardrop, on a diplomatic mission connected with the burning of a long-cherished but doubtfully valuable lamp shade!"
"Won't you sit down, please? You will pardon me if I read your uncle's letter?" Mr. Wintermuth responded.
Helen assented, and the other leisurely read the few lines the letter contained. In the interim the visitor glanced about the room to apprehend the setting of the scene into which she was now come. Presently her host spoke.
"I gather from what your uncle says that you have come not to call on an old friend of his, but to look at maps and daily reports and surveys, and find out what a fire insurance company is really like. And although I am quite old enough to be your father, I would really much rather you had come to see me," he remarked pleasantly.
"If I had known you before, I undoubtedly would have done so," the girl smilingly returned.