They shook hands.
"I'm to wait here till my clothes dry, yore man says."
"Then you'd better sit down," she suggested.
Within five minutes she knew that he had been in New York less than three hours. His impressions of the city amused and entertained her. He was quite simple. She could look into his mind as though it were a deep, clear well. There was something inextinguishably boyish and buoyant about him. But in his bronzed face and steady, humorous eyes were strength and shrewdness. He was the last man in the world a bunco-steerer could play for a sucker. She felt that. Yet he made no pretenses of a worldly wisdom he did not have.
A voice reached them from the top of the stairs.
"Do you know where Miss Whitford is, Jenkins?"
"Hin the Red Room, sir." The answer was in the even, colorless voice of a servant.
The girl rose at once. "If you'll excuse me," she said, and stepped out of the room.
"Hello, Bee. What do you think? I never saw such idiots as the police of this town are. They're watching this house for a desperado who assaulted some one outside. I met a sergeant on our steps. Says he doesn't think the man's here, but there's just a chance he slipped into the basement. It's absurd."
"Of course it is." There was a ripple of mirth in the girl's voice. "He didn't come in by the basement at all, but walked in at the front door."