[40]

“Grimshaw. I am Miss Frink’s private secretary and man of affairs.”

“Pompous little birdie,” thought Hugh, and he regarded his visitor closely with his one eye, remembering John Ogden’s reference to the pussy-footing secretary who was to be Miss Frink’s heir.

The nurse brought the suit to the bedside for Hugh to empty the pockets. There was the photograph in its worn leather case, a card, a handkerchief, some keys, a knife, but the suit being new had not accumulated the usual papers and old letters. There was a spotless pocketbook or billfold, and Hugh smiled ruefully at sight of it. He knew its contents.

“All right,” he said, and left the lot in the nurse’s hands.

The secretary continued to stare disapprovingly at the smoke-wreathed bed. As he accepted the dilapidated suit from the nurse, he spoke again:

“I feel I should tell you, Mr. Stanwood, that tobacco is very offensive to Miss Frink, especially in the form of cigarettes. Of course, you have put us under great obligation” (Hugh noted the “us”), “but I must warn you that we cannot allow the atmosphere of the house to be vitiated and made disagreeable for Miss Frink.”

[41]

[41]

Hugh smiled faintly toward the speaker. “Fine of you to look out for her,” he said. “Might shut the transom, nurse.”

The secretary’s full lips drew together and he glared at this self-possession. Insolence, he called it. Of course, the man was injured, but, in consideration of such hospitality as was being shown him, he might at least act promptly upon such information.

Leonard returned to Mrs. Lumbard flushed, and with the little crack in his voice that came with excitement.

“Lying there, smoking like a young nabob,” he reported. “I told him Miss Frink’s horror of tobacco, and he merely asked the nurse to close the transom. Such nerve!”

“Yes,” returned Adèle, interested, “we surely knew already that he had nerve: and isn’t he a beauty?”

“Oh, certainly,” returned the other, throwing down the clothes on a table with a vigor that suggested a wish that the owner was occupying them. “Head all bandaged but one eye, arm 

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