"I must see him," cried the old gentleman. "You needn't announce me.

I'll go right up. I'm his wife's uncle, and she telephoned me to come."

"Front!" called the clerk. "This gentleman to 450."

At the door of 450 he dismissed his guide with suitable _largesse_, and softly entered the room. It was brightly illuminated, and Uncle Richard was able clearly to contemplate his nephew of eight hours in animated converse with a handsome woman in evening dress.

"I think, sir," said the woman, "that there is some mistake."

"I agree with you, madam," said Uncle Richard, "and I'm sorry for it."

"But you are exactly the man to help us," cried the nephew; "we are in an awful state."

"I agree with you, sir," repeated Uncle Richard.

"You _must_ know how to help us," urged the nephew. "I've lost Marjorie."

"So I should have inferred. But she had already thrown herself away."

"She's _lost_!" stormed the bridegroom. "Don't you understand? Lost, lost, lost!"

"I rather think he misunderstands," the handsome woman interrupted.

"You've not told him, John, who I am."

"You are mistaken," replied Uncle Richard with a horrible suavity; "I understand enough. That poor child telephoned to me not twenty minutes ago that her husband was injured, perhaps mortally, and implored my help. I left my dinner to come to his a.s.sistance and I find him--here--and thus."

"Twenty minutes ago?" yelled John, leaping upon his new relative and quite disregarding that gentleman's last words. "Where was she? Did she tell you where to look for her?"

"So, sir," stormed Uncle Richard, "the poor, deluded child has left you and turned to her faithful old uncle! Allow me to say that you're a blackguard, sir, and to wish you good-bye."

"If you dare to move," stormed John Blake, "until you tell me where my wife is, I'll strangle you. Now listen to me. This is Mrs. Bob Blake, wife of my cousin Robert. She's an old friend of Marjorie's. We had a half engagement to meet here this week. Bob is due any minute, but Marjorie is lost. There is only one record of a Blake in to-day's register and that's this room and this lady--when Marjorie left me at the ferry she was coming here, straight. I've been to all the possible hotels. She is nowhere. You say she telephoned to you. From where?"

"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."

[Ill.u.s.tration: UNCLE RICHARD'S FACE, AS HE MET JOHN'S EYES, WAS A STUDY.]

"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 b.u.t.tons 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 s.n.a.t.c.hed the key and the paper upon which the supercilious clerk had inscribed, at Marjorie's embarra.s.sed 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 d.i.c.k and Gladys. Come, my dear."

MISERY LOVES COMPANY.

"But, Win," remonstrated the bride-elect, "I really don't think we _could_. Wouldn't it look awfully strange? I don't think I ever heard of its being done."

"Neither did I," he agreed. "And yet I want you to do it. Look at it from my point of view. I persuade John Mead to stop wandering around the world and to take an apartment with me here in New York. Then I meet you. The inevitable happens and in less than a year John is to be left desolate. You know how eccentric he is, and how hard it will be for him to get on with any other companion--"

"I know," said Patty, "that he never will find any one--but you--to put up with his eccentricities."

"And then, as if abandoning him were not bad enough, I go and maim the poor beggar: blind him temporarily--permanently, if he is not taken care of--and disfigure him beyond all description. Honestly, Patty, you never saw anything like him."

"I know," said she, "I know. A pair of black eyes."

"Black!" he cried, "why, they're all the colors of the rainbow and two more beside, as the story-book says. All the way from his hair to his mustache he is one lurid sunset. I don't want to minimize this thing. It has only one redeeming feature: he will be a complete disguise. No amount of rice or ribbon could counteract his sinister companionship. No bridal suspicions could live in the light of it. Doesn't that thought help?".

The conversation wandered into personalities and back again, as a conversation may three days before a wedding, but Patty was not entirely won over to Hawley's view of his responsibility for having with unprecedented dexterity and precision planted a smashing "right" on the bridge of his friend's nose in the course of an amicable "bout."

"And the oculist chap says," Winthrop urged, "that he simply must not be allowed to use his eyes. I'm the only one who takes any interest in him or has any control over him, and to abandon him now would be an awful responsibility. Can't you see that, dear? If we stay at home to take care of him he will understand why we're doing it, and he'd vanish. Do let me put him into a motor mask and attach him to the procession."

"Well, of course, Win," Patty answered, "of course we must have him if you feel so strongly about it. It's a pity," she ended mischievously, "that he dislikes me so much."

"That's because you dislike him. But just wait till you know one another."

"I will," she answered with a spirit which promised well for the future.

"I'll wait."

And Winthrop was so touched and gratified by her complaisance that he had no alternative, save to duplicate it, when the following evening brought him this communication: