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He could not get a good view of her face because her hat shaded her eyes. Mrs. Hilmer's figure, equally indistinct, was a shapeless mass of humanity. A child, coming out of a nearby house with a pair of roller skates in her hand, stood off and answered his questions, at first reluctantly, but finally with the importance of encouraged childhood... Who was the lady in the wheeled chair? Mrs. Hilmer.
"This is the best arrangement, under the circumstances," Watson explained. "You'll want to be quiet and lie low." Fred assented indifferently. He was very tired and all he longed for was a chance to sleep. In less than fifteen minutes after his release Fred Starratt found himself alone in the narrow impersonal room where Hilmer's emissary had installed him.
He waited until after the noon hour to begin the collection of his commissions. Hilmer's cashier had promised to send his messenger around to the different companies before eleven o'clock. He went into the first office with an assumption of buoyance. The cashier looked down at him through quizzical spectacles.
Fred took the proffered pasteboard and as he did so his fingers closed over Hilmer's mangled thumb. He could feel himself trembling from head to foot... He waited until Hilmer was gone. Then he crawled slowly in the direction of the street again. Midway he felt some force impelling him to a backward glance.
One day he said to her, as inconsequentially as he could: "I really think, my dear, that I ought to be planning to get a woman here in your place... Now that Hilmer's business is reasonably assured, I can afford it... It's too much to ask of you keeping up your house and doing this, too." "Well," she shrugged, "we can board if it gets too much for me." "You know I detest boarding."
Armed guards paraded before the entrance to the docks and only occasional idlers sunned themselves and viewed the silent and furtive loading of restive craft straining at their moorings. He began to wonder dimly whether he had left Storch dead or merely stunned, and, granting either alternative, how definitely this circumstance would halt the plot against Hilmer's life.
"His right arm, I suppose?" Fred suggested, with an air of resignation. He was wondering whether anybody at Hilmer's office had authority to sign checks. "Yes," the visitor assented, briefly.
It came off the boat preceded by a thin line of automobiles, moving slowly. ... For a moment he wondered how he would achieve his purpose, and the next thing he knew he had leaped aboard the running board... He remembered long after that his wife had given a cry, that Mrs. Hilmer had stirred ever so slightly, that Hilmer's eyes had widened.
Hilmer's like all men he won't have a mistress for a wife... And she never would be any man's mistress while she saw a chance for the other thing ... she's too " She broke off suddenly, unable to find a word inclusive enough for all the contempt she wished to crowd into it. He was learning things.
Hilmer's ambition to christen a seagoing giant, and she had been chosen to act as godmother to a huge oil-tanker only a year before, but a serious accident had laid her low. Now, though she was unable to perform the rite herself, she had intrusted her part to her faithful friend, Mrs. Starratt. It was to be done by proxy, as it were, with Mrs.
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