Marjorie Dean at Hamilton Arms

“Cut me off his card index,” supplied Leslie with forceful moroseness.

Both chaperon and charge had spoken louder than they were aware. In the next room the last few sentences of their talk had come clearly to Doris’s ears. While she was not specially curious she could not help being impressed by what she heard.

“If I had been like some of the girls I’ve known I’d not have engaged a chaperon at all after he turned me down,” Leslie defended darkly. “I’m supposed not to know he has ever showed a spark of interest in me since he cut me out of his life. Don’t you let him call you down because I told you to visit your head off if you liked among your friends while I was at Hamilton. You may tell him I hired you and chased you away from me when I felt like being alone for a while. He owes you a debt of gratitude for telling me that he didn’t quite efface himself from my map. Tell him,” she snickered faintly, “that I pay you a salary for acting as a friend instead of a priggish frump. Tell him he ought to double your salary from his end of the deal for the same reason.”

“Why – Leslie!” Grateful amazement this time prompted the chaperon’s exclamation. “I had no idea you felt that way about me.”

“I had no idea myself,” Leslie retorted. She cast a half sheepish glance toward Mrs. Gaylord. She was experiencing the peculiar sensation of physical glow which invariably attends the moral defense of another person. For the first time in her wayward career she felt moved to defend someone for whose offense she was strictly to blame.

CHAPTER XVII

“NERVE”

Mrs. Gaylord took up her temporary abode at the Essenden expecting at almost any hour to be summoned to Peter Cairns’s offices or else receive a call from him at the hotel. Neither the summons nor the call came.

Following her spirited moment of defense of her chaperon Leslie returned to her usual half domineering, always wilful manner. Since her father had seen fit to order Mrs. Gaylord on the scene, she had decided that the chaperon would be more of an asset than a hindrance. Under Mrs. Gaylord’s wing she and Doris could go about more freely to tea rooms and hotel restaurants, and the theatres. They could stay out later in the evening with a certain feeling of assurance which neither had possessed during their first evening venture into New York’s gaieties.

The day after New Years Leslie announced to her chaperon and Doris that she wished they would go where they pleased and do as they pleased through the days that remained to them of the Christmas holiday, but without her company.

“Gaylord can show you the village as well as I can; maybe better,” she assured Doris with a droll twist of her mouth. “She won’t be peevish with you. I would, if you made me sore, which you’d probably do. I have special business to tend to here in the next few days. It concerns my garage proposition and is very important. I’ll hustle around through the days so as to go out to dinner with you in the evenings.”

Doris was as well pleased with Leslie’s new arrangement though she kept her satisfaction carefully hidden behind her politely indifferent features. She and Mrs. Gaylord had grown friendly from the start. The chaperon admired the sophomore’s unusual beauty and enjoyed the covert appreciation it drew wherever they went. She thought Doris’s poise remarkably high-bred and was satisfied that Peter Cairns could but approve of her as a friend for his daughter. He was still in the city, she believed. Leslie was of the same belief. “Don’t doubt he knows our middle names and what time we come back to the hotel every night,” was her shrewdly humorous opinion.

The special business to which she devoted her days was typical of the intriguing side of Leslie. While her father was presumably keeping an eye on her, she was even more anxious to trace his movements. She burned to know how long he intended to stay in New York, and whether he was staying at the family residence far out on Riverside Drive, or at his club.

There was another man, too, besides her father, whose whereabouts in New York she was eager to learn. He was a man to whom her father had more than once intrusted certain business about which she thought she knew a good deal. This man had come to their home twice as a dinner guest. He was tall, slim, with aquiline, foreign features, deep set dark eyes and iron gray hair. She could recall distinctly his courtly manners. What she could not recall was his full name. It was Anton – . There memory failed her.

After she had unsuccessfully racked her brain for the missing surname she came into startled knowledge of a way to gain it. Dared she take it? Leslie’s heart beat faster every time she thought about it. She could not make up her mind to take it until she had definite information concerning her father’s plans. She decided that she would at once try to obtain it from his offices.

On the day after New Years she left Mrs. Gaylord and Doris directly after breakfast and hurried from the Essenden to start on the trail of the “special” business. It was a fairly long drive from the Essenden to her father’s downtown offices. Leslie grew perceptibly nervous as she neared her destination. There was no one to witness her uneasiness, however. There was only one chance against a hundred that she might encounter her father. She could not imagine what she would do if she were to come suddenly face to face with him. And in this thought lay her inclination to panic.

She arrived at last before the skyscraper, two floors of which housed the executive and clerical forces necessary to Peter Cairns’s several speculative interests. Leslie ordered the driver of the taxicab to wait and made a bold entrance into the building. She could hear her heart begin to thump against her side as she dodged into the cage of a waiting elevator and dodged out again at the third floor. Presently she had walked a little way down a wide corridor and opened a door which in the past she had opened many times.

It led to an outer office, given over to the keeping of a solitary office boy. When she inquired for Mr. Carrington, one of her father’s important managers, and gave the youngster her name, he stared at her with blue startled eyes and made a zealous dash for a door leading to an inner office.

“How are you, Mr. Carrington?” she drawled to a clean-cut pleasant man of perhaps forty, who had instantly emerged from the office to greet her and now ushered her into his private business domain.

“Very well, Miss Cairns; thank you. And you? It has been a long time since you visited these offices.”

“Yes;” Leslie smiled affably. She was speculating how long it might take to “pump Carrington, and beat it.” “I was at college for several winters, you know, and away from New York summers. I’m not at the Riverside Drive house much. It doesn’t pay to keep it open. My father is there so seldom for any length of time.”

“So he tells me. He doesn’t stay even in New York for any length of time, for that matter,” laughed the manager. “It isn’t an easy proposition, getting hold of him when I need him.”

“I should imagine not.” Leslie smiled in apparent sympathy. “Even I lose track of him for days at a time. I am at the Essenden, at present with my chaperon, Mrs. Gaylord. I came down town this morning to see if you would help me with a little steamer surprise I am planning to give my father. That is, if he goes to England soon. I thought you would let me know the day and hour he’d plan to sail. Then I wouldn’t need to ask him a single question, beforehand. He is likely to start for England in a hurry without coming to the hotel to say good-bye. Then where would my surprise be?” Leslie put just the right amount of dejection into the question.

“Oh, he has changed his mind about the trip to England, Miss Cairns. He doesn’t intend to go across the pond until he comes back from the coast. That will be two weeks at least. I will let you know, nearer the date of sailing,” was the pleasant promise.

“The western trip? Oh, yes.” Leslie nodded wisely. “I have no surprise ready for him for that. There’d hardly be time for one, would there?” she asked innocently.

“Hardly.” The manager consulted his watch as though amused at his own reply. “His car was to pull out from the B. R. P. at noon today. It’s almost noon now.”

“You mean for the west; to the coast?” was Leslie’s double question. It was asked with a drawling inflection that nearly robbed it of interrogation.

“Yes. Where shall I address you, Miss Cairns, about the England matter?” Mr. Carrington questioned courteously.

“At the Essenden. Thank you so much, Mr. Carrington. You are always so kind to me. Not a word to my father that I was here!” She raised a playful forefinger. “You understand why.”

“Absolutely discreet, Miss Cairns.” The manager raised a hand as though taking an oath.

After a further brief exchange of pleasantries Leslie rose to depart. She was in nervous haste to be gone. It had taken “nerve,” according to her way of thinking, to lead up to the information she had sought, then to ask the right questions at the right time. She had not devised until the last moment a way of exacting secrecy from the manager that would not arouse him to suspicion against her. She knew that her father’s lieutenants of years were chary of speech and still more chary of information. It was evident that her father’s harsh stand in regard to herself was not known in his offices. Since Mr. Carrington did not know it, Leslie was sure he did not, then none other of his staff of financiers knew.

She would have liked to ask Mr. Carrington to give her the surname of the man, Anton. She remembered that the manager had once dined with them on the same evening as the foreigner. She had not dared ask about him. Nor did she believe it would be wise to call again at her father’s offices to interrogate Mr. Carrington further. She recalled the old fable of the pitcher that went once too often to the well and was broken. She did not intend to risk losing what she had already gained. There was still the other way of learning the name.

CHAPTER XVIII

ON THE OUTSIDE LOOKING IN

Leslie stopped for luncheon at an odd French restaurant, the Fontainebleau. It was a Gallic triumph in soft grays and rated as being more Parisian than any other restaurant in New York. After luncheon she ordered the driver of the taxicab she was using to take her for a spin on Riverside Drive.

“Keep on going out Riverside till I tell you to turn around,” she ordered the man. “If you hear me tell you to go slow, then go slow. I’m interested in certain properties out on the Drive.”

Even by prosaic daylight Leslie felt a strange new sentiment for New York which had never before visited her. What a wonderful life she might have in the splendid city of her birth if only she were her father’s assistant. Perhaps she might be, and before another year had passed. If she could successfully carry out at Hamilton the project which was now occupying her thoughts he would be forced to admire her for her audacity and brilliancy. How he would laugh at a certain feature of her undertaking. Not unless she were clever enough “to get away with it.” That was a foregone conclusion.

Leslie’s swarthy features stiffened with stubborn determination. This time there was to be no failure. Her small dark eyes were engaged in keeping a concentrated watch on the residences lining the Drive as the taxicab slipped easily along on the smooth paving.

It would be a great day for her when her father forgave her and took her back into his confidence. Before she devoted herself wholly to a career in finance under her father’s generalship she would make him take her for a long cruise to the South Seas in his superb, clean-lined yacht, the White Swallow. So Leslie promised herself as the car sped on.

Presently she had come within pleasantly familiar territory. Since earliest childhood she had seen the palaces she was now passing. In them lived families she had known and associated with as neighbors. She had played with the girls and boys of these vast, cheerless castles. They had all had the same dancing masters; had attended one another’s parties. They had later formed the younger set with whom she had moved socially. Like herself many of them lived only to please themselves.

There it was; her old home! It was the house in which she had been born; the house from which her mother had passed to Heaven, leaving behind a baby girl to be brought up by nurses and governesses and surfeited with riches out of all healthy proportion.

Leslie snatched the speaking tube from its accustomed place and called through it to the driver. “Slow down,” she ordered, “but keep on going.” She had spied the house from a distance of half a block away. In consequence the driver had begun to slacken speed before the machine had passed the “show shop,” as Leslie had whimsically named her home because of its ornate splendor of architecture and breadth of rare-shrubbed lawn.

“Go ahead and park,” she again ordered through the speaking tube. “Any place along here will do.” The instant he had obeyed her and brought the machine to a stop she hopped out of it and quickly gained the sidewalk. The Cairns’s residence took up a half of one block. Another massive gray stone residence claimed the remaining half of the same block.

“Thank fortune,” she muttered as she strolled along at the slow swagger she affected. “There’s no place like home, Leslie, old top. Peter the Great can lead a merry life at the show shop, but I should fidget, for all he cares,” was her bitter reflection. “Rather that than see the place boarded up like a disused barn. Gee whiz! Then I would have my troubles. Wonder how much of the menagerie is at large inside?”

Leslie paraded up and down the entire block several times. From the street she could see nothing about the exterior of the house to challenge her interest. An ornamental iron fence squared the Cairns’s property. The entrance gates were closed, apparently locked. She stopped before them during one of her patrols and pretended to lean against them. As she did so she investigated them. They were securely fastened.

She stood eyeing them with sullen dismay, her forehead corrugated by a deep scowl. Of a sudden she appeared to have laid hold of a forgotten fact. Her brows cleared like magic. Thanks to a crafty provision against such an emergency in time past she could cope with this latest obstacle.

She lingered at the gates as long as she thought prudent, her avid glance roving from point to point of the house, searching for signs of the servants about the place. She smiled grimly to herself as she recalled how often in her childhood days bright-eyed groups of “common kids” would pause on the sidewalk outside to peer wistfully through the iron interstices of the fence at the spring glory of crocuses, hyacinths and tulips which graced the Cairns’s garden beds in colorful, fragrant loveliness. How contemptuous she had been of the famished little beauty worshippers! Now she was “on the outside, looking in.” She was “on the wrong side of the fence.” She was “barred out” of the show shop as effectively as had been “those common kids.”

CHAPTER XIX

A STRANGER IN THE HOUSE

Next day Leslie repeated the visit to her home. The second expedition to it was made in a small black car which she boldly requisitioned from a garage located not far from her father’s offices. There he kept several cars, immediate to the use of himself and one or two of his lieutenants.

The call Leslie had made at her father’s offices had proved advantageous to her. She had not only gained important information from Mr. Carrington, she had also received a fresh supply of temerity to bolster her for further daring deeds. She knew the manager of the garage to which she went only slightly. He had treated her request with the respect due Peter Cairns’s daughter. She calculated there was small possibility that the proprietor and her father would ever discuss her visit to the garage. She preferred that risk to the annoyance of being watched by a curious taxicab driver.

On the second occasion she was free to park her own car. She made one deliberate patrol of the block. Then paused before the gates. From a pocket of the leather motor coat she wore she pulled a heavy medium-sized brass key suspended from a brass ring. Without an instant’s hesitation she fitted the key to a fat brass padlock which secured the gates against intruders.

“Whuh-h-h!” Leslie blew a breath of relief. “Easiest thing I ever tried to do,” she murmured with satisfaction. “Wonder who’s home, or if anyone saw me?” She drew the key from the open padlock, fastened it in place from the inside of the gates through which she had just triumphantly passed and snapped it energetically back on guard. “This time,” she laughed her silent selfish laugh, “I’m on the inside, looking out.”

In spite of her bold manner and ready laughter Leslie was experiencing a certain amount of trepidation. She fought it down with all the sternness she could summon against herself. The night before, long after Doris and Mrs. Gaylord had retired, Leslie had sat at a little table in her room arranging the peculiar expedition to which she had now committed herself. She had drawn a sketchy little plan of the first and second floors of her home. With a lead pencil she had lightly traced on the plan precisely the course by which she would proceed when she had once passed through the vestibule of her home and had set foot in the great entrance hall with its lofty ceiling and grand stairway.

Knowing her father’s secretive nature she was reasonably sure that such of the servants as might be in the house knew nothing of the strained relations between herself and her father. Parsons, the steward, might be there, possibly the second cook and two or three of the maids. The others had probably been sent to the country house on Long Island which was never closed. When in or near New York, summer or winter, this was her father’s favorite haunt.

Leslie had resolved to brazen matters out, if, when she entered the house, she should suddenly encounter any of the servants. Her objective was a certain room on the second floor. It held something she wanted; needed; must have.

“Go to it,” she mutteringly encouraged the reluctant side of her brain. With this spur to action she sauntered away from the gate and up to the short drive which soon curved to the left and continued on to the garage behind the house. She left the drive for the wide stone walk leading up to the deep, central pillared veranda. Her cool, self-possessed manner, her walk, indifferent, swaggering, was at variance with the excited beating of her heart and her private distaste for the visit she was about to make. This distaste was not of moral persuasion. Leslie was merely afraid that her father might have changed his mind about going west at the last minute. It was “Peter the Great,” not the servant she dreaded encountering. If her father were afterward to learn from any of the servants whom she might encounter of her visit to the house, it would show him that she was a force not easy to control.

To gain access to the house itself would be a simple matter since the doors and windows had not been sealed. Leslie had several latch keys on a special ring which fitted various doors of her stately home. She was well prepared, but chose to use the main entrance for the sake of appearances, should she be observed.

She stepped presently into the great rosewood reception hall with its vast crystal sheet of mirror, occupying the whole lower end of the apartment; its two grim guardian Norman suits of armor. A richly cushioned bench extended the length of one side of it. Leslie paused beside the bench, listening for sounds of human presence other than the thump of her heart and the excited sigh of her own breath. Not a sound disturbed the church-like quiet which pervaded the hall.

She dropped down on the bench and carefully restored to a small leather handbag the latch key she had just used and which she still held in one hand. For as much as ten minutes she sat still, watching, waiting, listening, hoping no one might come. During that time her eyes roved ceaselessly about the hall and from the magnificent archway, lightly draped with velvet of a rosewood tint, to a lower smaller arch at the rear of the hall which stood open into a sun parlor.

She rose, at length slipped silently as an Indian to the grand archway and made a comprehensive survey of the French salon beyond the arch. Satisfied that no one was there to spy upon her she next inspected the sun parlor. There her father always established himself in the morning, when at home, with the morning papers. The long mahogany library table was stacked with an orderly array of newspapers and magazines. That in itself was significant proof to Leslie that “Peter the Great” was “missing from the show shop.”

Without pausing to explore further the main floor of the house she turned and darted noiselessly back into the hall and up the grand stairway. Straight as an arrow she directed her steps on reaching the second floor landing to a wide solid looking door of black walnut which stood part way down a short wide corridor hung on both sides with nothing but marine paintings. It was Peter Cairns’s famous marine collection; the pride of his heart. Leslie ran her fingers up and down one side of the knobless black walnut door. Silently it slid to the left, disappearing into a space cleverly designed to receive it. She was across the threshold in one long step and the door was moving back into place again.

This time she indulged in a burst of silent merriment as she collapsed into an immense leather arm chair. She “had got away with it.” She was now safe from any possible intrusion of servants. She was in Peter the Great’s own den. No one other than they two knew the secret mechanism of the walnut door. When she left the house it would be by a private stairway leading directly to a side veranda which no one but herself and her father ever used. She had not been able to enter by this means. There was only one key to the veranda entrance to the stairway and this was carried by the financier. The long room behind the walnut door, furnished comfortably rather than luxuriously, was Peter Cairns’s den. In it were his rarest books, a collection of priceless ancient coins, one of cameos, and numbers of unique treasures picked up in all parts of the world. Leslie could open the door from the inside by manipulation of a little steel knob, like that of a safe. The door would close after her, securing itself automatically.

When her flash of victorious amusement had subsided she let her gaze travel slowly about her. Quickly her features changed to a somber cast. She was once more in the good old “playroom” of happier days. It was in this very room that she had best learned to understand her father. Peter Cairns had then treated her more as though she were his son instead of his daughter. Her grotesquely plain little face and lawless domineering ways as a youngster had appeared to please and entertain him. He had called her his “ugly little beauty kid” and “the boss” and “Cairns II.” He had, as she had grown older, and come home from prep school, then college, spent long hours with her in the den. Sometimes they had played chess or backgammon of which they were both fond. Again he would talk freely to her of his financial operations. It was a school into which the maxims of Brooke Hamilton would not have fitted. Peter Cairns had made Leslie’s mind up to his own way of living as he was one day to learn.

Realizing the flight of time she gathered herself together for the final episode of her surreptitious errand. She rose, crossed the room to where a rare etching hung and lifted it from its hook. The space thus left vacant showed the indentation of a wall safe. Leslie manipulated the tiny knob with sure fingers. She next pulled open the safe’s door and moved a tiny switch inside the cavity. A bright light flooded it. She ran a finger down a stack of small, black, leather-bound notebooks, bindings out, lettered in gilt, A to Z. She drew the third book, I to M, from the little pile and sat down with it in the nearest chair.

“So that’s his name – Lavigne! It sounds French, but he looked more like a dago. He’s probably forgotten his real name,” Leslie mused satirically. “All right, Anton. I’ll proceed to tell your fortune. You are going to receive a visit from a dark woman who knows all about you.”