“No, no.  Right in you stay.  ’Sh-h-h, just don’t mention it.  Enough pleasure you give me to ride by me.  Take good care your foot.  Good-by, Mrs. Fischlowitz.  All the way home you should take her, James.”

Once more within the gloom of her Tudor hall, Mrs. Meyerburg hurried rearward and toward the elevator.  But down the curving stairway the small maid on stilts came, intercepting her.

“Madame!”

“Ja.”

“Madame will please come.  Mademoiselle Betty this afternoon ees not so well.  Three spells of fainting, madame.”

“Therese!”

“Oui, not serious, madame, but what I would call hysteeria and mademoiselle will not have doctor.  Eef madame will come—­”

With a great mustering of her strength Mrs. Meyerburg ran up the first three of the marble steps, then quite as suddenly stopped, reaching out for the balustrade.  The seconds stalked past as she stood there, a fine frown sketched on her brow, and the small maid anxious and attendant.

“Madame?”

When Mrs. Meyerburg spoke finally it was as if those seconds had been years, sapping more than their share of life from her.  “I—­now I don’t go up, Therese.  After a while I come, but—­but not now.  I want, though, you should go right away up to Miss Becky with a message.”

“Oui, madame.”

“I want you should tell her for me, Therese, that—­that to-morrow New-Year’s dinner with the family all here, I—­I want she should invite the Marquis Rosencrantz.  That everything is all right.  Right away I want you should go and tell her, Therese!”

“Oui, madame.”

Up in her bedroom and without pause Mrs. Meyerburg walked directly to the small deal table there beside her bed and still littered with half-curled blue-prints.  These she gathered into a tight roll, snapping a rubber band about it.  She rang incisively the fourth of the row of bells.  A man-servant responded almost immediately with a light rap-a-tap at the door.  She was there and waiting.

“Kemp, I want you should away take down this roll to Goldfinger’s office in the Syndicate Building.  Just say Mrs. Meyerburg says everything is all right—­to go ahead.”

“Yes, madam.”  And he closed the door after him, holding the knob a moment to save the click.

* * * * *

In a Tudor dining-hall, long as the banquet-room of a thane, faced in thrice-weathered oak and designed by an architect too eminent to endure interference—­except when Miss Meyerburg had later and at her own stealthy volition installed a Pompeian colored window above the high Victorian fireplace—­the wide light of a brilliant New-Year’s day lay against leaded window-panes, but shut out by thick hangings.

Instead, the yellow light from a ceiling sown with starlike bulbs lay over that room.  At each end of the table, so that the gracious glow fell full upon the small figure of Mrs. Meyerburg at one end and upon the grizzled head of Mr. Ben Meyerburg at the other, two braces of candles burned softly, crocheting a flickering design upon the damask.