assistance 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."

[Illustration: 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 buttons of the white waistcoat and making the white w