“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 whiskers quiver.

“I know nothing whatever about any lady in any of your rooms,” he roared, greatly to the delight of the bellboys.  “I know nothing about your Underwood woman, with her doctors and her hysterics.  I want to see the manager.”

“If,” said the telephone maiden, adjusting her skirt at the hips and shaking her figure into greater conformity with the ideal she had set before it—­“If this gentleman is 2525 Gram., then the lady in 625 rang him up at seven-thirty and held the wire seven minutes talkin’ to him and cryin’ to beat Sousa’s band.  All about her uncle she was talkin’.  I guess it was him, all right, all right.  His voice sounds sort of familiar to me when he talks mad.”