“Look! ’Tain’t him!”
The front page was lavishly decorated with the heads of officers of the International Exposition, the center one in large headlines: “Cary Penwick, vice president.” Martha pointed dramatically to the heavy-jowled, baggy-eyed visage, fully illustrating the voice over the wire. She looked over her shoulder fearfully, and around the room, before whispering:
“That’s him! Then who’s the other one?”
“Oh, he has gone,” I said, hysterically; “quite gone, and everything with him!”
Martha sank on the nearest chair, and the paper fell fluttering to the floor.
“I said we’d wake up some mornin’ and find ourselves murdered in our beds on account of that there Duchess!” she wailed. I laughed helplessly; so after all, I was juggled by fate into old Mrs. Mace’s successor! I smoothed out the bit of crumpled paper, under the light, and read it mechanically.
“To Enid Legree. . . . Forty thousand dollars. . . . Signed Ettère Dantrè.”
Dantrè! . . . And Dantrè had a wager on with Penwick. . . . And somebody had vowed to exhibit a Fierienti! And Dantrè had cried out about old Mrs. Mace’s Romney! What did it mean? . . . And that heavy, shifty-eyed countenance in the paper. . . . I sprang up, as the telephone again rang, with hope surging upward. It was the voice of the vice president of the Exposition:
“I could not get out tonight, my dear girl. . . . ’Fraid you’d wait up. I’ll see you in the morning.”
The sharp contrast of that voice’s quality enhanced the memory of the other. I thanked him, and proceeded to play the game.