“You will get fifty thousand dollars at least,” he said.
“Ten ambulances!” she cried. “Oh, Baron, how very generous! I’m afraid I’ve cherished hard feelings about you both that have not been justified. How perfectly splendid of you!”
“One other thing,” said the Baron, “I am sending this by a trusted messenger at once. Please see that some one reliable is there to receive it.”
It was safer, Trent thought, to gain the Square over the roofs and down the stairways of the apartment house. It was now raining and hardly a soul was in view. The Adrien Beekman house was only a block distant. They were of the few who retained family mansions on the lower end of Fifth Avenue.
He knocked at the Beekman door and a man-servant opened it. In the shadows the man could only see the dark outline of the messenger.
“I am the Baron von Eckstein,” he said, still with his carefully mimicked accent. “This is the package of which I spoke to your mistress.”
It seemed, when he got back to Webster Hall, that none had missed him. The first to speak was the Baroness.
“We are just going over to the house,” she said cordially.
“I don’t want to share you,” he said, smiling, “with all these others. I’d rather come to-morrow at four. May I?”
At four on the next day Anthony Trent, dressed in the best of taste as a man of fashion and leisure, ascended the steps to the Burton Trent home and wondered, as others had done before him, at the amazing fowl which guarded its approach.