“Well, I never!” Camille exclaimed. “And all the time Arthur Glendenning has been saying that it was Mike!”
Dix took the packages and stood up.
“I don’t think you need disturb yourself about what he says. By the way, how do you like Revell?”
“Very much,” the girl replied, but she flushed as she did so.
Dix, who saw everything, saw that.
“Oho! So we are in love, are we?” he thought.
But he said:
“Then I take it that Glendenning does not like him.”
Camille, too, got up.
“Like him! The last time he was here—or was it the time before?—he said that Mr. Revell had killed Mike.”
“Ah?” Dix indifferently rejoined. “Well, stranger things have happened.”
With the packages under his arm, he went on and out and reached his office, where he learned that the reception room was full. Before seeing any of the patients, he telephoned instructions to an undertaker, telephoned more to the Amsterdam Trust Company; after which, one at a time, with businesslike expedition, he bundled his patients off.
When all had gone, the bank messenger arrived. Dix gave him the packages.
“Here is a manuscript that belongs to the Vulper estate. Here are ten thousand dollars that belong to it, also. You may give me a receipt for both.”
Even an expert cannot count ten wads, of fifty bills each, in two minutes. Dix, judging that the messenger might be four or five at it, took down an old copy of a review.
In it was an account of a series of surgical operations performed on a woman who, though the account did not say so, perhaps wanted to be a belle—a vocation for which she had been rather handicapped, for she had had a squat nose, high cheek bones, protruding ears, thick, wide lips, and eyes, like Anne Boleyn’s, each of a different color.
According to the account, these pleasantries of nature had been one and all—and without a scar—corrected.
The account continued:
“The cartilages were detached from the nasal bones, and the periosteum and tissues separated from them. A small portion of the septum was also removed, and so much of the bridge was then cut that when, toward the median line, both sides were broken with a forceps, they met and formed a perfectly straight Greek nose.
“With the lips, a longitudinal incision was made from the corner of the mouth, a half inch from the vermilion border, and run parallel with the white skin line, the incision being continued to the opposite corner. An oblong piece of the submucous and cellular tissue on each side of the median line was then removed, and, after turning away enough of the membrane, the operation was so conducted that, when the wound and its edges were approximated with fine silk sutures, the margin of the lip could be drawn down and rolled under, thereby acquiring the Cupid’s bow.
“With the cheek bones, the mucous membrane in the mouth was divided from the median line to the posterior border of the supermaxillary; all tissues, together with the periosteum, were separated; and when, with a chisel, enough of the molar bone was removed, a face symmetrically oval resulted.
“With the eyes—”
But now the messenger interrupted.
“I’ve been over them twice, sir. I make it nine thousand nine hundred and eighty dollars. Will you count them yourself?”
Dix shook his head.
“Make out a receipt accordingly.”
That done and the messenger gone, Dix turned again to the story of the happy lot of the lady who wanted to be a belle.
Meanwhile, Camille, aware of the impatient cob and the patient groom and aware, too, that she was no longer in a mood for a run that day, sent Margaret to tell them not to wait. Deciding then that, temporarily at least, she could eat nothing in the apartment, she telephoned to Kate Delafield, arranged to have the girl join her for luncheon at a Fifth Avenue inn, and changed her costume for street dress.
Later, over eggs cooked in potatoes, a mousselined chicken, and poached peaches, the two girls talked as only two girls can talk, until Kate Delafield, remembering an appointment, abandoned Camille, who, in a taxi, sailed up again and on through the Park to Seventy-second Street, turned for the Riverside.
But in a moment Camille screamed, poked at the chauffeur, stopped him, jumped out, and darted down the subway stair. A ticket taker yelled and swore at her. She did not heed him. She did not hear. Intent only on catching up with a man whose face for a second she had seen, the cries of a hundred ticket takers would not have stopped her. Only, as it happened, an express was just pulling out. She had missed him.
“You wasn’t leaving me like this, was you, lady?”
She turned. Before her was the chauffeur.
There are explanations that explain nothing. Camille attempted none. Accompanied by the chauffeur, who, on the landing above, winked with unfathomable good-fellowship at the fuming ticket taker, she reentered the taxi and drove to her home, where, as she was paying the man, Glendenning marched up.
“I’ve had such a start!” she told him. “I thought I saw Mike.”
“Where? When?”
“Just now, at the subway entrance.”
“Well, you may have. But I hardly think so. He never goes out in the daytime.”
Camille moved back.
“What do you mean?”
Glendenning, balancing himself on one foot, replied:
“Revell has him locked up at the St. Jasper.”
Indignantly the girl’s lip curled. “Oh, come now! First you had Mike murdering his father. Then you had Mr. Revell murdering Mike. Now he has him in a cage. Well, I believe that as much as I do the rest of it.”
“Camille,” he snorted, “there are things that
