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CHAPTER XXII.
A CASE FOR TWO

As Bobs left the small shop, she glanced at her watch, and finding that it was nearly four, she hastened her steps, recalling that that was the hour when she might expect a call from the young lawyer. As she turned the corner at the East River, she saw a small, smart-looking auto drawing up at the curb in front of the Pensinger mansion, and from it leaped a fashionably groomed young man. Truly an unusual sight in that part of New York’s East Side, where the clothes, ill-fitting even at best, descended from father to son, often made smaller by merely being haggled off at arm and ankle. No wonder that Ralph Caldwaller-Cory was the object of many an admiring glance from the dark eyes of the young Hungarian women who, with gayly colored shawls over their heads, at that moment were passing on their way to the tobacco factory; but Ralph was quite unconscious of their scrutiny, for, having seen Bobs approaching, he hastened to meet her, hat in hand, his good-looking, clean-shaven face glowing with anticipation.

“Have you found a clue as yet, Miss Vandergrift?” he asked eagerly, when greetings had been exchanged.

Roberta laughed. “No, and I’ll have to confess that I haven’t given the matter a moment’s thought since we parted three hours ago.”

“Is that all it has been? To me it has seemed three centuries.” The boy said this so sincerely that Roberta believed that he must be greatly interested in the Pensinger mystery. It did not enter her remotest thought that he might also be interested in her. Having reached the mansion, Bobs led the way up the wide stone steps, saying: “I do hope Gloria and Lena May are at home. I want my sisters to meet you.”

But no one was to be seen. Gwen was still in her room, while the other girls had not returned from the Settlement House.

“Well, there’s another time coming.” Bobs flashed a smile at her companion, then led the way to the wide fireplace, where comfortable chairs awaited them, and they seated themselves facing the still burning embers.

“I say, Miss Vandergrift,” Ralph began, “you’re a girl and you ought to know better than I just what another girl, even though she lived seventy-five years ago, would do under the circumstances with which we are both familiar. If you loved a man, of whom your mother did not approve, would you really drown yourself, or would you marry him and permit your parents to believe that you were dead?”

Bobs sat so long gazing into the fire that the lad, earnestly watching her, wondered at her deep thought.

At last she spoke. “I couldn’t have hurt my mother that way,” she said, and there were tears in the hazel eyes that were lifted to her companion. “I would have known that her dearest desire would be for my ultimate happiness.”

“But mothers are different, we will have to confess,” the lad declared. “Marilyn’s may have thought only of social fitness.” Then, as he glanced about the old salon and up at the huge crystal chandeliers, he added: “I judge that the Pensingers were people of great wealth in those early days and probably leaders in society.”

“I believe that they were,” Roberta agreed, “but my mother had a different standard. She believed that mental and soul companionship should be the big thing in marriage, and for that matter, so do I.”

Ralph felt awed. This was a very different girl from the hoidenish young would-be detective with whom he had so brief an acquaintance.

“Miss Vandergrift,” he said impulsively, “I wish I had a sister like you, and wouldn’t my mother be pleased, though, if you were her daughter. A girl, I am sure, would have been more of a comfort and companion to her when my brother Desmond died.” Then he added, after a moment of silence: “I can get your point of view, all right. I wouldn’t break my mother’s heart by pretending to drown myself, not even if the heavens fell.”

“I’d like to know your mother,” Roberta said. “She must be a wonderful woman.”

“She is!” the lad declared. “I want you to meet her as soon as she returns. Just now she is touring the West with friends, but, to get back to Marilyn Pensinger. From the little that we know of her family, I conclude that her mother was a snob and placed social distinction above her daughter’s happiness. But, the very fact that the father made his will as he did, proves, doesn’t it, that he loved his daughter more sincerely? He did not cut her off with a shilling when he believed that she had eloped with a foreign musician. Instead, he arranged so that a descendant of that Hungarian, whose name we do not even know, would inherit all that Mr. Pensinger possessed. But this isn’t getting us anywhere. Do you happen to know anyone who has recently come over from Hungary?”

Bobs smiled. “Wouldn’t that be grasping at straws?”

“Maybe, but do you?”

Roberta thought a moment, then looked up brightly. “I believe I do. At least I know a Hungarian. His name is Mr. Hardinian and he is doing social welfare work. He speaks perfect English, however, and may have been born in this country. Suppose we go over to his clubhouse and interview him.”

Then, as she rose, she added: “You will like Mr. Hardinian. He has such beautiful eyes.”

Ralph laughed as he also arose. “Is that a girl’s reason for liking a man?” he inquired. Then he added, “Would I were a Hungarian that I might have interesting eyes. As it is, mine are the plain, unromantic American variety.”

Roberta smiled at her new friend, but what she said showed that her thought was far from the subject: “Before we go, I want to be sure that my sister, Gwen, is comfortable.”

Gwendolyn was sleeping so quietly that Roberta believed she would not awaken before Lena May’s return, and so, beckoning the lad to follow, she left the house, closing the door softly. Ralph turned and looked back at the upper windows of the rooms that were not occupied, as he inquired: “Do you have a hunch that the old mansion holds the clue we are seeking?”

Roberta’s reply was: “Only the ghost of Marilyn knows.”

When the two partner-detectives were in the small, luxurious car, and going very slowly, because of the congested traffic down First Avenue, Ralph said: “Tell me a little about your sisters and yourself that I may feel better acquainted.” And so, briefly, Roberta told the story of their coming to the East Side to live.

“I say, Miss Vandergrift, that certainly was hard luck, losing the fine old place that your family had supposed was its own for so many generations.” Then the lad added with sincere admiration: “You girls certainly are trumps! I’m mighty glad I met you, and I hope you’ll be glad, too, some day.”

“Why, Mr. Caldwaller-Cory, I’m glad right this very moment,” Roberta assured him in so impersonal a manner that the lad did not feel greatly flattered. Indeed, he was rather pleased that this was so. Being the son of a famous judge, possessed of good looks, charming manners and all the money he wished to spend, Ralph had been greatly sought after by the fond mothers of the girls in his set, if not by the maidens themselves, and it seemed rather an interesting change to meet a girl whose interest in him was not personal.

After a silent moment in which the lad’s entire attention had been centered on extricating his small auto from a crush of trucks, vegetable-laden push-carts and foreign pedestrians, he turned and smiled at his companion. “Let’s turn over to Central Park now,” he suggested. “It’s a little round about, I’ll agree, but it will be pleasanter riding.”

It was decidedly out of their way, but a glance at her wrist watch assured Roberta that Lena May would have returned to be with Gwen by that time, and so she was in no especial hurry.

How beautiful the park seemed after the thronged noisy East Side with its mingled odors from tobacco, fish markets, and general squalor.

“There, now we can talk,” Ralph said as he drove slowly along one of the winding avenues under a canopy formed by wide-spreading trees. “What shall it be about?”

“You,” Roberta replied. “Tell me about yourself.”

“There isn’t much to tell,” the lad began. “My brother Desmond and I grew up in a happy home. During the winter months we attended a boys’ school up the Hudson, and each summer vacation we traveled with our parents. We have been about everywhere, I do believe. Desmond and I were all in all to each other. We were twins. Perhaps that was why we seemed to love each other even more than brothers usually do. I did not feel the need of any other boy companion, and when at last we entered college we were permitted to be roommates. In our Sophomore year, Desmond died, and I didn’t much care what happened after that. It seemed as though I never could room with another chap; but at last the dormitories were so crowded that I had to take a fellow in. That was two years ago, and today Dick De Laney is as close to me as Desmond was, almost, not quite, of course. No one will ever be that. But, I tell you, Miss Vandergrift, Dick is a fine chap, clear through to the core. I’d bank on Dick’s doing the honorable thing, come what might. I’m a year older than he is, and he won’t finish until June, then he’s coming on here to little old New York and spend a month with me. I say, Miss Vandergrift, I’d like to have you meet him.”

Roberta smiled. “I’ve been waiting for you to come to a period that I might tell you that Dick De Laney and I were playmates when we wore pinafores. You see, they were our next-door neighbors.” Bobs said this in so matter-of-fact a tone that Ralph did not think for one moment that this could be the girl his pal had once told him that he loved and hoped to win.

If only Ralph had realized this, much so might have been saved for one of them.

CHAPTER XXIII.
PARTNER-DETECTIVES

It was five-thirty when the partner-detectives left the quiet park, where long shadows were lying on the grass and where birds were calling softly from one rustling tree to another.

“It seems like a different world, doesn’t it?” Bobs said, as she smiled in her friendliest way at the lad at the wheel. She had felt a real tenderness for her companion since he had told her about Desmond, and she was glad that an old friend of hers had been a comfort to him.

“It does, indeed,” he declared with a last glance back at the park. “I like trees better than I do many people. We have some wonderful old elms around our summer home in the Orange Hills. When my mother returns I shall ask her to invite you four girls to one of her week-ends, or to one that she will plan just for me, after Dick comes.”

Then, as they were again on the thronged East Side, the lad said:

“Seventy-sixth Street, beyond Second, you said, didn’t you?”

“Yes. There is the Boys’ Club House just ahead,” Roberta exclaimed. Then as they drew up at the curb, she added: “Good! The door is open and so Mr. Hardinian probably is here.”

The young man whom they sought was still there, and as they entered the low wooden temporary structure which covered a vacant lot between two rickety old tenements, they saw him smiling down at a group of excited newsies, who were evidently relating to him some occurrence of their day.

He at once recognized Roberta and made his way toward her, while the boys to whom he had spoken a few words of dismissal departed through a side door, leaving the big room empty.

Bobs held out her hand as she said: “Mr. Hardinian, this is my friend, Mr. Caldwaller-Cory, and we have come, I do believe, on a wild goose chase.”

Ralph at once liked the young man with the lithe, wiry build and the dark face that was so wonderfully expressive.

He looked to be about twenty-four years of age, although he might have been even a year or two older. An amused smile accompanied his question: “Miss Vandergrift, am I the wild goose?”

The girl laughed. “That wasn’t a very graceful way of stating our errand,” she said, “so I will begin again. The truth of the matter is that Mr. Cory and I are amateur detectives.”

Again Mr. Hardinian smiled, and, with a swinging gesture that seemed to include the entire place, he said: “Search where you will, but I doubt if you will detect here a hidden wild goose.” Then, more seriously, he added: “Come, let us be seated in the library corner, for I am sure that your visit has some real purpose.”

Mr. Hardinian listened to the story of the Pensinger mystery, which, as little was really known about it, took but a brief moment to tell. At its conclusion he said: “Did you think. Miss Vandergrift, that I might know something about all this? I truly do not. Although I was born in Hungary, while I was still an infant my parents went to England, where I was educated, and only last year the need of my own people brought me here where so many of them come, believing that they are to find freedom and fortune. But how soon they are disillusioned, for they find poverty, suffering and conditions to which they are unused and with which they know not how to cope. Many of the older ones lose out and their children are left waifs all alone in this great city. I found when I reached here that they needed me most, the homeless boys who, many of them, slept huddled over some grating through which heat came, or in hallways crowded together for warmth, until they were told to move on. And so the first thing that I did was to rent this vacant lot and build a temporary wooden structure. Now with these walls lined with bunks, as you see, I can make many of the boys fairly comfortable at night.”

“I say, Mr. Hardinian,” Ralph exclaimed, “this is a splendid work that you are doing! I’m coming over some night soon, if I may. I want to see the place in full swing.”

“Come whenever you wish,” was the reply. And then, as Roberta had risen, the young men did also.

The girl smiled as she said: “Honestly, Mr. Hardinian, I knew in my bones that you would not be able to help us solve the mystery, but you were the only Hungarian with whom I had even the slightest speaking acquaintance, and so we thought that we would tell you the story and, if you ever hear anything that might be a clue, let us know, won’t you?”

“Indeed I will, and gladly. Good-bye! Come over Sunday afternoon at four, if you have no other plans. We have a little service then and the boys conduct it entirely.”

When they were again in the small car, Ralph was enthusiastic. “I like that chap!” he exclaimed. “I wish detectives could plan to have things turn out the way an author can. If I had the say of it, I’d make Mr. Hardinian into a descendant of Marilyn Pensinger and then he could inherit all of that fortune and use it for his homeless waifs.”

It was after six when the small car stopped in front of the Pensinger mansion, and Ralph declared that since he had a date with his dad, he could not stop to meet the other Vandergrift girls, as he greatly desired.

That night, when Ralph returned from an evening affair which he had attended with his father, he did not retire at once. Instead, he seated himself at his desk and for half an hour his pen scratched rapidly over a large sheet of white paper. He was writing a letter to Dick De Laney, his close-as-a-brother friend, telling him that at last the only girl in the world had appeared in his life.

“I always told you, old pal, that I’d know the girl who was meant for me the minute that I met her. But I do believe that she is going to be hard to win.”

CHAPTER XXIV.
ROMANCE BUDDING

Two weeks have passed since the evening upon which Bobs and her new friend, Ralph Caldwaller-Cory, drove together in Central Park and told each other briefly the story of their lives. It does not take interested young people long to become acquainted and these two had many opportunities to be together, for were they not solving the Pensinger mystery, and was it not of paramount importance that the poor defrauded heir of all those idle millions should be found and made happy with his rightful possessions? Of course no other motive prompted Ralph, the rising young lawyer, to seek the companionship of his detective-partner, not only daily but often, in the morning, afternoon and evening.

They had sought clues everywhere in the mansion, but the great old rooms had failed to reveal aught that was concealed. Too, they had long drives in the little red car that its owner called “The Whizz,” and these frequently took them far away from the thronged East Side along country roads where, quite undisturbed, they could talk over possible clues and plan ways to follow them.

And all this time Roberta really thought that Ralph’s interest in her was impersonal, for the lad dreaded revealing his true feeling until she showed some even remote sign of being interested in him.

“If I tell Bobs that I care for her, it might queer the whole thing,” was one thought suggested to him as he rode home alone one night through the quiet park. Another thought was more encouraging. It suggested, “But a girl’s pride won’t let her show that she cares. There is only one way to find out, and that is to ask.” And still another assured him, “There is every reason why Roberta Vandergrift should be pleased. You, Ralph, have wealth and position, and can restore to her all that she has lost.”

“Lots you know about Bobs,” the lad blurted out as though someone really had spoken to him. “My opinion is that Roberta isn’t really grown up enough as yet to think of love. She considers her boy friends more as brothers, and that’s what they ought to be, first and foremost. I’ll bide my time, but if I do lose Bobs, it will be like losing Desmond all over again.”

Meanwhile, although no progress had been made in solving the mystery, much progress was being made in other directions.

Gloria, with Bobs and Ralph, had attended a Sunday afternoon meeting of the Boy’s Club and Mr. Hardinian had walked home with them and had remained for tea. He was very glad to have an opportunity to talk with a young woman whose interest in welfare work paralleled his own, especially as he had one rather wayward boy whom he believed needed mothering more than all else.

Gloria’s heart indeed was touched when she heard the sad story that the young man had to tell, and she gladly offered to do what she could.

She invited the wayward boy to one of her game evenings at the Settlement House, and in teaching him to play honestly she not only won his ardent devotion but also saved him from being sent to the island reformatory for petty thievery.

After that Mr. Hardinian frequently called upon Gloria when he needed advice or help.

The little old book shop, during the eventful two weeks, had started, or so it would seem, on a very successful business career.

Because of the little memorandum that she had made in her note book on the day that Nell Wiggin had first telephoned to her, Mrs. Doran-Ashley did tell the ladies who attended the next model tenement board meeting about the shop, and asked them to visit it, which they did, being sincerely interested in all that pertained to their venture. And not only did they buy books, but they left others to be sold on commission. One glance at the fine face of the lad who was bookseller made them realize that, crippled as he might be, he would not accept charity.

“How’s business this hot day?” Bobs asked early one morning, as she poked her head in at the door. She was on her way down to the Fourth Avenue Branch of the Burns Detective Agency, where she went every day to do a few hours’ secretarial work for Mr. Jewett.

“We had a splendid trade yesterday,” the lad replied, as he looked up from the old book of poetry which he was reading. And yet, since he held a pencil, Bobs concluded that he was also writing verse as the inspiration came.

“How so?” she inquired.

“The shop had a visit from no less a personage than Mr. Van Loon, the millionaire book collector, of whom you told me. He bought several volumes that I hadn’t supposed were worth a farthing, and what he paid for them will more than cover our expenses up to date. I wonder how he happened to know about this out-of-the-way shop?”

“Oh, I guess he goes nosing around after old books, sort of ferrets them out, like as not. Well, so long! I’m mighty glad our shop is financially on its feet.”

As Bobs went on her way down the crowded First Avenue she smiled to herself, for it was she who had sent Mr. Van Loon a business-like letter announcing the opening of an old book shop, feeling sure that he would not miss an opportunity of seeing it if it held something that he might desire.

Fifteen minutes after her departure, Dean again heard the door open, and this time a dear little boy of three darted in and hid beneath a book-covered counter, peering out to whisper delightedly, “I’se hidin’! Miss May, her’s arter me.”

Almost immediately the pursuer, who was Lena May Vandergrift, appeared in the doorway. The young bookseller was on his feet at once and there was a sudden light in the dreamy brown eyes that told its own story.

“Good morning, Dean,” the girl said. “Have you seen Antony Wilovich? I told him to wait out in front for me so that he could escort me to the Settlement House this morning.”

Dean smiled knowingly and replied, which was his part of the game: “Well, well, has that little scamp run away again somewhere, and hidden? I guess he doesn’t love his Miss May or he wouldn’t do that.”

This always proved too much for the little fellow in hiding, and from under the counter he would dart, his arms extended. Then the girl, stopping, would catch him in a loving embrace. “I do so love Miss May,” the child would protest. “I loves her next most to my muvver over dere.” A chubby finger would point, or the golden head would nod, in the direction of the rickety tumble-down tenement across the way, the very one which Miss Selenski, the former agent of the model tenement, had called a “fire trap.”

This little game of hide-and-seek took place every morning, for Lena May had promised the “muvver over dere,” who was slowly dying of consumption, that she would call for Tony, take him to the Settlement sandpile and return him safely at noon.

If this was a merry moment each day for little Tony, it was to Dean Wiggin much more. The sweet, sympathetic girl, in her pretty muslin dress and flower-wreathed hat, suggested to the lad from the country all that he most loved, the fragrance of blossoms, the song of birds, and the peace of the meadow-pool at noon time. When she was gone, with a friendly backward nod at the crippled bookseller, he would always read poetry or try to write one that would express what Lena May was to him, to little Tony, or to the invalid mother who trusted her with her one treasure.

And so that two weeks had raised the curtain upon three dreams, but one of them was to become a tragedy.