The man made a few more notes, saluted, and took his
leave. Fischer and Lutchester remained for a
moment upon the pavement.
“It is a dangerous custom,” Lutchester
remarked, “to take a servant without a reference.”
“It will be a warning to me for the remainder
of my life,” Fischer declared.
“I, too, have learnt something,” Lutchester
concluded, as he turned away.
Fischer, as he waited for Pamela the following afternoon
in the sitting-room of her flat on Fifty-eighth Street,
felt that although the practical future of his life
might be decided in other places, it was here that
its real climax would be reached. Pamela herself
was to pronounce sentence upon him. He was feeling
scarcely at his best. An examination in the courthouse,
which he had imagined would last only a few minutes,
had been protracted throughout the afternoon.
The district attorney had asked him a great many questions,
some rather awkward ones, and the inquiry itself had
been almost grudgingly adjourned for a few hours.
And here, in Pamela’s sitting-room, the first
things which caught his eye were the headlines of
one of the afternoon papers:
Western millionaire engages
the girl HESTE’S murderer
as chauffeur!
Attempted murder and suicide
in fifth Avenue
last night.
Fischer pushed the newspaper impatiently away, and,
in the act of doing so, the door was opened and Pamela
entered. She came towards him with outstretched
hand.
“I see you are looking at the account of your
misdeeds,” she said, as she seated herself behind
a tea tray. “Will you tell me why a cautious
man like you engages, without reference, a chauffeur
who turns out to be a murderer?”
Fischer frowned irritably.
“For four hours,” he complained, “several
lawyers and a most inquisitive police captain have
been asking me the same question in a hundred different
ways. I engaged the man because I needed a chauffeur
badly. He was to have brought his references this
morning. I was only trusting him for a matter
of a few hours.”
“And during those few hours,” she observed,
“he seems to have developed a violent antipathy
to Mr. Lutchester.”
“I do not understand the affair at all,”
Mr. Fischer declared, “and, if I may say so,
I am a little weary of it. I came here to discuss
another matter altogether.”
She leaned back in her place.
“What have you come to discuss, Mr. Fischer?”
“That depends so much upon you,” he replied.
“If you give me any encouragement, I can put
before you a great proposition. If your prejudices,
however, remain as I think they always have been, on
the side of England, why then I can do nothing.”
“If I counted for anything,” Pamela said,
“I mean to say if it mattered to any one what
my attitude was, I would start by admitting that my
sympathies are somewhat on the side of the Allies.
On the other hand, my sympathies amount to nothing
at all compared with my interest in the welfare of
the United States. I am perfectly selfish in that
respect.”
