The minister smiled at the irony, while scanning once more the pages of
his little date-book. "To look in after prayer meeting about
nine-thirty on Wednesday night would be my next opportunity, I should
say," he reported presently.
"Wednesday!" complained Marien. "It is three eternities away.
However," and her voice grew crisp with decision, "Wednesday night it
shall be. In the meantime, do you speak anywhere? I shall attend the
mother’s meeting, if you will tell me where it is. I shall even come to
prayer meeting; and," she concluded vivaciously; "you will be borne away
by me triumphantly in my new French car, which was sent out here weeks
and weeks ago to be tuned up and ready for my coming."
On Wednesday night Miss Dounay made good her word. When the little
prayer-meeting audience emerged from the chapel room of All People’s, it
gazed wonderingly at a huge black shape on wheels that rested at the
curb with two giant, fiery eyes staring into the night.
The old sexton, looking down from the open doorway, saw his pastor shut
into this luxurious equipage with two strange women, for Marien was
properly accompanied by Julie, and nodded his head with emphatic
approval.
"Some errand of mercy," he mumbled with fervency. "Brother Hampstead is
the most helpful man in the world."
Nor was this the last appearance of Marien Dounay’s shining motor-car
before the door of All People’s. It was seen also in front of the
palm-surrounded cottage on the bay front, where John Hampstead lived
with his sister, Rose, and the children, and enjoyed, at times, some
brief seclusion from his busy, pottering life of general helpfulness.
Once the car even stopped before the home of the Angel of the Chair,
perhaps because Hampstead had told Marien casually that of all women
Mrs. Burbeck had alone been consistently able to understand him, and the
actress wished to learn her secret. But the Angel of the Chair, while
quite unabashed by the glamour of the actress-presence, nevertheless
refused entirely to be drawn into talk about Brother Hampstead, who was
usually the most enthusiastic subject of her conversation. Instead she
spent most of the time searching the depths of Miss Dounay’s baffling
eyes with a look from her own luminous orbs, half-apprehensive and
half-appealing, that made the caller exceedingly uncomfortable; so that
Marien would have accounted the visit fruitless and even unpleasant, if
she had not, while there, chanced to meet the young man known to fortune
and the social registers as Rollo Charles Burbeck.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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