To his surprise the lady turned round with a gay laugh.  Sharlee had supposed that Mr. Queed, having been offended by her, was deliberately cutting her.  That her identity had literally dropped cleanly from his mind struck her as both much better and decidedly more amusing.

“Don’t you remember me?” she reminded him once again, laughing full at him from the threshhold.  “My dog knocked you over in the street one day—­surely you remember the pleasure-dog?—­and then that night I gave you your supper at Mrs. Paynter’s and afterwards collected twenty dollars from you for back board.  I am Mrs. Paynter’s niece and my name is Charlotte Weyland.”

Weyland?...  Weyland?  Oho!  So this was the girl—­sure enough—­that Henry G. Surface had stripped of her fortune.  Well, well!

“Ah, yes, I recall you now.”

She thought there was an inimical note in his voice, and to pay him for it, she said with a final smiling nod:  “Oh, I am so pleased!”

Her little sarcasm passed miles over his head.  She had touched the spring of the automatic card-index system known as his memory and the ingenious machinery worked on.  Presently it pushed out and laid before him the complete record, neatly ticketed and arranged, the full dossier, of all that had passed between him and the girl.  But she was nearly through the door before he had decided to say: 

“I had another letter from my father last night.”

“Oh!” she said, turning at once—­“Did you!”

He nodded, gloomily.  “However, there was not a cent of money in it.”

If he had racked his brains for a subject calculated to detain her—­which we may rely upon it that he did not do—­he could not have hit upon a surer one.  Sharlee Weyland had a great fund of pity for this young man’s worse than fatherlessness, and did not in the least mind showing it.  She came straight back into the room and up to the table where he sat.

“Does it help you at all—­about knowing where he is, I mean?”

“Not in the least.  I wonder what he’s up to anyway?”

He squinted up at her interrogatively through his circular glasses, as though she ought to be able to tell him if anybody could.  Then a thought very much like that took definite shape in his mind.  He himself had no time to give to mysterious problems and will-o’-the-wisp pursuits; his book and posterity claimed it all.  This girl was familiar with the city; doubtless knew all the people; she seemed intelligent and capable, as girls went.  He remembered that he had consulted her about securing remunerative work, with some results; possibly she would also have something sensible to say about his paternal problem.  He might make an even shrewder stroke.  As his landlady’s agent, this girl would of course be interested in establishing his connection with a relative who had twenty-dollar bills to give away.  Therefore if it ever should come to a search, why mightn’t he turn the whole thing over to the agent—­persuade her to hunt his father for him, and thus leave his own time free for the service of the race?