“Will you come with me over to the Empress Club, and I will write the letter there?” Dorise suggested, still entirely mystified.
To this the stranger agreed, and they left the tea-shop and walked together to the well-known ladies’ club, where, while the mysterious messenger sipped tea, Dorise sat down and wrote a long and affectionate letter to her lover, urging him to exercise the greatest caution and to get back to London as soon as he could.
When she had finished it, she placed it in an envelope.
“I would not address it,” remarked the other girl. “It will be safer blank, for I shall give it into his hand.”
And ten minute later the mysterious girl departed, leaving Dorise to reflect over the curious encounter.
So Hugh was in Malines. She went to the telephone, rang up Walter Brock, and told him the reassuring news.
“In Malines?” he cried over the wire. “I wonder if I dare go there to see him? What a dead-alive hole!”
Not until then did Dorise recollect that the girl had not given her Hugh’s address. She had, perhaps, purposely withheld it.
This fact she told Hugh’s friend, who replied over the wire:
“Well, it is highly satisfactory news, in any case. We can only wait, Miss Ranscomb. But this must relieve your mind, I feel sure.”