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“She didn’t say,” answered Uncle Richard, shame-facedly, and added still more dejectedly, “I didn’t ask. She said in a letter her aunt received this morning that she was coming here. So I inferred that she was here.”

“Then she is here,” cried Gladys. “It’s some stupid mistake in the office.”

“I’ll go down to that chap,” John threatened, “and if he doesn’t instantly produce Marjorie I’ll shoot him.”

“You’ll do nothing of the sort,” his uncle contradicted, “the child appealed to me and I am the one to rescue her. I shall interview the manager. I know him. You may come with me if you like.”

Down at the desk they accosted the still-courteous clerk. Uncle Richard produced his card, and, before he could ask for the manager the clerk flicked a memorandum out of one pigeon-hole, a key out of another, and twirled the register on its turn-table almost into the midst of the white waistcoat.

“The lady has been expecting you for hours, Mr. Underwood,” said he. “Looked for you quite early in the afternoon, so the maid says. Register here, please. Quite hysterical, she is, they tell me, and the maid was asking for the doctor–Front! 625!”

Uncle Richard’s face, as he met John’s eyes, was a study. The telephone-girl disentangled the receiver from her pompadour so that she might hear without hindrance the speech which was bursting through the swelling buttons of the white waistcoat and making the white whiskers quiver.

“I know nothing whatever about any lady in any of your rooms,” he roared, greatly to the delight of the bellboys. “I know nothing about your Underwood woman, with her doctors and her hysterics. I want to see the manager.”

“If,” said the telephone maiden, adjusting her skirt at the hips and shaking her figure into greater conformity with the ideal she had set before it–“If this gentleman is 2525 Gram., then the lady in 625 rang him up at seven-thirty and held the wire seven minutes talkin’ to him and cryin’ to beat Sousa’s band. All about her uncle she was talkin’. I guess it was him, all right, all right. His voice sounds sort of familiar to me when he talks mad.”

But John had neither eyes nor ears for Uncle Richard’s wrath. He snatched the key and the paper upon which the supercilious clerk had inscribed, at Marjorie’s embarrassed dictation, “Mrs. Underwood, West Hills, N.J. (husband to arrive later), 625 and 6,” and, since love is keen, he jumped to the right conclusion and the open elevator without further delay.

An hour or so later the attention of the clerk and the telephone-girl was again drawn to the complicated Blakes. A party of four sauntered out of the dining-room and approached the desk.

“I’ll register now, I think,” said John. And when he had finished he turned to the star-eyed girl behind him.

“Look carefully at this, Marjorie,” he admonished. “Mr. and Mrs. John Blake. You are Mrs. John Blake. Do you think you can remember that?”

“Don’t laugh at me,” she pleaded, “Gladys says it was a most natural mistake, and so does Bob. Don’t you, Gladys and Bob?”

“An almost inevitable mistake,” they chorused mendaciously, “but,” added Bob, “a rather disastrous mistake for your uncle to explain to his wife, the doctor and the nurse. He’ll be able for it, though; I never saw so game an old chap.”

“And I’ll never do it again,” she promised. People never do when they’ve been married a long, long time, and I feel as though I had been married thousands and thousands of years.”

“Poor, tired little girl,” said John, “you have had a rather indifferent time of it. Say good-night to Dick and Gladys. Come, my dear.”