“Are these the relatives you were visiting, Miss Redmond?” inquired Lizzie, eaten up with curiosity, which was her mortal weakness.

Agatha paused, struck with the form of the maid’s question; but, knowing her liking for items of news, she answered cautiously: 

“Not relatives exactly.  The Thayers were old friends of my mother.”

Lizzie shook out a skirt and hung it in the wardrobe in the far corner of the room.  She was bursting to know everything about Miss Redmond’s sudden journey, but knew better than to appear anxious.

“The message at the hotel was so indefinite that I didn’t know at all what I should do.  After the excitement quieted down a little, I went out to visit my cousin Hattie, in the Bronx.”

“What sort of excitement?”

“Oh, newspaper men, and the manager, and Herr Weimar, of the orchestra, and a lot of other people who came, wanting to see you immediately.  They seemed to think I was hiding you somewhere.”

Agatha smiled.  She could imagine Lizzie in her new-fledged importance, talking to all those people.

“You spoke of a message—­” ventured Agatha.

“Yes; the one you sent the day you left, Miss Redmond.  The hotel clerk said you had suddenly left town on a visit to a sick relative.”

“Oh, yes.”

Lizzie’s quick scent was already on the trail of a mystery, but Agatha was in no mood just then to give her any version of the events of that Monday afternoon.

“Was there any other message, Miss Redmond?  Some word for me, which the clerk forgot to deliver?”

“No, nothing else.”

“Mr. Straker came Tuesday morning with some contracts for you to sign.  He said that you had an appointment with him, and he was nearly crazy when he found you had gone away without leaving your address.”

Agatha smiled more and more broadly, to Lizzie’s disgust, but she could not help it.  “I don’t doubt he was disturbed.  Did he come again?”

“Come again, Miss Redmond!” Lizzie hung a blue silk coat over its hanger, held it carefully up to the light, and turned toward her mistress with the mien of a person who isn’t to be bamboozled.  “He came twice every day to see if I had any word from you; and when I went to Cousin Hattie’s he called me up on the ’phone every morning and evening.  Most unreasonable, Mr. Straker was.  He said there wasn’t a singer in town he could get to fill your engagements, and he was losing a hundred dollars a day.  He’s very much put out, Miss Redmond.”

“Well, I was, too,” said Agatha, but somehow her tone failed to satisfy the maid.  To Agatha the thought of the dictatorial manager fluttering about New York in quest of a vanished singer—­well, the picture had its humorous side.  It had its serious side, too, for Agatha, of course, but for the moment she put off thinking about that.  Lizzie, however, had borne the brunt of Mr. Straker’s vexation, and, in that lumber-box she called her mind, she regarded the matter solely as her personal cue to come more prominently upon the stage.