e Mr.
Maxwell earlier in the day, and the last time had asked if he might sit
down and wait for him. He had been waiting only a few minutes.

"But who is he?" demanded Louise, with a provisional indignation in case
it should be a liberty on some unauthorized person's part. "Didn't he
give you a card?"

He had given the girl a card, and she now gave it to Mrs. Maxwell. It
bore the name Mr. Lawrence Sterne, which Louise read with much the same
emotion as if it had been Mr. William Shakespeare. She suspected what
her husband would have called a fake of some sort, and she felt a little
afraid. She did not like the notion of the man's sitting there in her
parlor while she had nobody with her but the girl. He might be all
right, and he might even be a gentleman, but the dark bulk which had
risen up against the window and stood holding a hat in its hand was not
somehow a gentlemanly bulk, the hat was not definitively a gentleman's
hat, and the baldness which had shone against the light was not exactly
what you would have called a gentleman's baldness. Clearly, however, the
only thing to do was to treat the event as one of entire fitness till it
proved itself otherwise, and Louise returned to the parlor with an air
of lady-*like inquiry, expressed in her look and movement; if this
effect was not wholly unmixed with patronage, it still was kind.

"I am sorry," she said, "that my husband is out, and I am sorry to say
that I don't know just when he will be at home." She stood and the man
had risen again, with his portly frame and his invisible face between
her and the light again. "If I could be of any use in giving him a
message--" She stopped; it was really sending the man out of the house,
and she could not do that; it was not decent. She added, "Or if you
don't mind waiting a few minutes longer--"

She sat down, but the man did not. He said: "I can't wait any longer
just now; but if Mr. Maxwell would like to see me, I am at the Coleman
House." She looked at him as if she did not understand, and he went on:
"If he doesn't recall my name he'll remember answering my advertisement,
some weeks ago in the _Theatrical Register_, for a play."

"Oh yes!" said Louise. This was the actor whom she had written to on
behalf of Maxwell. With electrical suddenness and distinctness she now
recalled the name, L. Sterne, along with all the rest, though the card
of Mr. Lawrence Sterne had not stirred her sleeping consciousness. She
had alway