Mary repeated the question in German whereupon the woman brightened up considerably.
The Herr was not at home. The Herr had gone out. On business, jawohl. To the bank, perhaps. But the Herr would be back in time for Mittagessen at noon. There was beer soup followed by Rindfleisch ...
Mary hesitated an instant. She was wondering whether she should leave her letter of introduction. She decided she would leave it. So she wrote on her card: “Anxious to see you as soon as possible” and the name of her hotel, and gave it, with the letter, to the woman.
“Please see that Herr Schulz gets that directly he comes in,” she said. “It is important!”
“Gut, gut!” said the woman, wiping her hands on her apron. She took the card and letter, and Mary, thanking her, set off to go back to her hotel.
About twenty yards from Mr. Schulz’s house a narrow alley ran off. As Mary turned to regain the little footbridge across the canal to return to the noisy street which would take her back to the hotel, she caught sight of a man disappearing down this alley.
She only had a glimpse of him, but it was sufficient to startle her considerably. He was a small man wearing a tweed cap and a tweed travelling ulster of a vivid brown. It was not these details, however, which took her aback. It was the fact that in the glimpse she had had of the man’s face she had seemed to recognize the features of Mr. Albert Edward Jeekes.
“What an extraordinary thing!” Mary said to herself. “It can’t be Mr. Jeekes. But if it is not, it is some one strikingly like him!”
To get another view of the stranger she hurried to the corner of the alley. It was a mere thread of a lane, not above six yards wide, running between the houses a distance of some sixty yards to the next street. But the alley was empty. The stranger had disappeared.
Mary went a little way down the lane. A wooden fence ran down it on either side, with doors at intervals apparently giving on the back yards of the houses in the street. There was no sign of Mr. Jeekes’s double, so she retraced her steps and returned to her hotel without further incident.