Author of “Angelica,” etc.
The house was very quiet to-night. There was nothing to disturb Miss
Alexandra Moran but the placid ticking of the clock and the faint stir
of the curtains at the open window. For that matter, a considerable
amount of noise would not have troubled her just then. As she sat at the
library table, the light of the shaded lamp shone upon her bright,
ruffled head bent over her work in fiercest concentration. She was
chewing the end of a badly damaged lead pencil, and she was scowling.
“No!” she said, half aloud. “Won’t do! It can’t be ‘fix’; but, by
jiminy, I’ll get it if it takes all night!”
She laid down the pencil and sat back in the chair, with her arms
folded. Though her present difficulty concerned nothing more serious
than a cross-word puzzle, an observer might have learned a good deal of
Miss Moran’s character from her manner of dealing with it. The puzzle
itself, with its neat, clear little letters printed in the squares,
would have been a revelation that whatever she undertook she did
carefully and intelligently--and obstinately.
She was a young little thing, only twenty-three, and quite alone in the
world, but not at all dismayed by that. Her father had died some three
years ago, and, instead of leaving the snug little fortune she had been
taught to expect, he had left nothing at all; so that at twenty she had
had her first puzzle to solve--how to keep alive without eating the
bread of charity.
_Copyright 1926, by Elisabeth Sanxay Holding_
It was no easy matter for a girl who was still in boarding school, but
she had done it. She had come to New York and had found a post as
nursery governess, and later as waitress in a tea room, and then in the
art department of an enormous store. She had gained no tangible profit
from these three years, she had no balance in the bank, but that did not
trouble her. She had learned that she could stand on her own feet, that
she could trust herself; and with this knowledge and the experience she
had had, and her quick wits and splendid health, she felt herself fully
armed against the world. Indeed, she had not a care on earth this
evening except the cross-word puzzle.
“It must be ‘tocsin,’” she said to herself. “There’s something wrong
with the verticals. It can’t be ‘fix,’ and yet--”
The telephone bell rang. Still pondering her problem, Lexy went across
the room.
“Is Miss Enderby there?” asked a man’s voice.
“She’s out,” answered Lexy cheerfully.
“No!” said the man’s voice. “She can’t--I--for God’s sake, where’s Miss
Enderby?”
“She’s out,” Lexy repeated, startled. “She went to the opera with her
mother and father.”
“Who are you?”
“I’m Mrs. Enderby’s secretary.”
“Look here! Didn’t Miss Enderby say anything? Isn’t there any sort of
message for me?”
“Nothing that I know of. The servants have gone to bed, but I’ll ask
them, if it’s anything important.”
“No!” said the voice. “Don’t! No, never mind! Good-by!”
“That’s queer!” said Lexy to herself, as she walked away from the
instrument, and then she dismissed the matter from her mind. “None of my
business!” she thought, and returned to her puzzle.
Suddenly an inspiration came.
“It _is_ ‘fix’!” she cried. “And it’s not ‘tocsin,’ but ‘toxins’!
Hurrah!”
This practically completed the puzzle, and she began to fill in the
empty squares with the peculiar satisfaction of the cross-word
enthusiast. It was perfect, now, and she liked things to be perfect.
As she leaned back, with a contented sigh, the clock struck twelve.
“Golly! I didn’t realize it was so late!” she reflected. “Queer time for
any one to ring up!”
She frowned again. Her special problem solved, she began to take more
interest in other affairs; and the more she thought of the telephone
incident, the more it amazed her. Caroline Enderby wasn’t like other
girls. The mere fact of a man’s telephoning to her at all was strange
and indeed unprecedented.
“And he was badly upset, too,” thought Lexy. “He asked if she left a
message for him. Think of Caroline Enderby leaving a message for a man!”
She began to feel impatient for Caroline’s return.
“I’ll tell her when we’re alone,” she thought; “and she’ll have to
explain--a little, anyhow.”
Lexy wanted an explanation very much, because she was fond of Caroline,
and very sorry for her.
Mrs. Enderby was a Frenchwoman of the old-fashioned, conservative type,
with the most rigid ideas about the bringing up of a young girl, and her
husband--Lexy had often wondered what Mr. Enderby had been before his
marriage, for now he was nothing but a grave and dignified echo of his
wife. Between them, they had educated Caroline in a disastrous fashion.
She had never even been to school. She had had governesses at home, and
when a male teacher came in, for music or painting lessons, Mrs. Enderby
had always sat in the room with her child. Caroline never went out of
the house alone. She was utterly cut off from the normal life of other
girls. She was a gentle, lovely creature--a little unreal, Lexy had
thought her, at first; and she, at first, had been afraid of Lexy.
Mrs. Enderby had advertised for a secretary, and Lexy had answered the
advertisement. Mrs. Enderby had wanted personal references, and Lexy had
supplied them, some five or six, of the highest quality. Mrs. Enderby
had investigated them with remarkable thoroughness, and had asked Lexy
many questions. Indeed, it had taken ten days to satisfy her that Miss
Moran was a fit person to come into her house, and Lexy had lived under
her roof and under her eagle eye for a month before she was allowed to
be alone with Caroline. After that first month, however, Mrs. Enderby
had made up her mind that Lexy was to be trusted, and the thin pretext
of “secretary” was dropped.
Mrs. Enderby suffered from a not uncommon form of insomnia. She could
not sleep at convenient hours--at night, for instance--but could and did
sleep at very inconvenient hours during the day; and what she wanted was
not a secretary, but a companion for her daughter during these hours.
She realized, too, that even the most strictly brought up _jeune fille_
needed some sort of youthful society, and in Lexy she had found pretty
well what she wanted--a well mannered, well bred young woman of
unimpeachable honesty. So she had permitted Lexy and Caroline to go
shopping alone, and sometimes to a matinée or to a tea room. She asked
them shrewd questions when they came home, and their answers satisfied
her perfectly. They had never even spoken to a man!
“And yet,” thought Miss Moran, “somehow Caroline has been carrying on
with some one, without even me finding out! I didn’t know she had it in
her!”
Lexy yawned mightily. She was growing very sleepy, but not for worlds
would she go to bed until she had seen Caroline. She lay down on the
divan, her hands clasped under her head, and let all sorts of little
idle thoughts drift through her mind. Now and then a taxi went by, but
this street in the East Sixties was a very quiet one. The house was so
very still, and there was nothing in her own young heart to trouble her.
Her eyes closed.
She was half asleep when the sound of Mrs. Enderby’s voice in the hall
brought her to her feet. It was a penetrating voice, with a trace of
foreign accent, and it was not a voice that Lexy loved. She went out of
the library into the hall.
“Did you enjoy--” she began politely, and then stopped short. “But
where’s Caroline?” she cried.
“Caroline? But at home, of course,” answered Mrs. Enderby.
“At home? Here?”
“But certainly! She had a headache. At the last moment she decided not
to go with us. You were not here when we left, Miss Moran.”
“I know,” murmured Lexy. “I had just run out to the drug store; but--”
“She went directly to bed,” Mrs. Enderby continued. “I thought, however,
that she would have sent for you during the course of the evening.”
“Oh, I see!” said Lexy casually.
At heart, however, she was curiously uneasy. Mr. Enderby stopped for a
moment, to give her some kindly information about the opera they had
heard. Then he and his wife ascended the stairs, followed by Lexy; and
with every step her uneasiness grew. She was sure that Caroline would
have sent for her if she had been in the house.
Mrs. Enderby paused outside her child’s door.
“The light is out,” she said. “She will be asleep. I shall not disturb
her. Good night, Miss Moran!”
“Good night, Mrs. Enderby!” Lexy answered, and went into her own room.
She gave Mrs. Enderby twenty minutes to get safely stowed away; then she
went out quietly into the hall, to Caroline’s room. She knocked softly;
there was no answer. She turned the handle and went in; the room was
dark and very still. She switched on the light.
It was as she had expected--the room was empty. Caroline was not there.