"Oh, dear me!" she said in pathetic protest; "is it all over town so soon? I'm afraid we are still dreadfully 'country' in Wahaska, Mr. Raymer. Please cut it down to the bare, commonplace facts whenever you have a chance, won't you? The poor man was sick, and nobody knew him, and somebody _had_ to take care of him."
Like the doctor, Raymer asked the inevitable question, "Who is he, Miss Margery?" and, like the doctor again, he received the same answer, "I haven't the smallest notion of an idea. But that doesn't make the slightest difference," she went on. "He is a fellow human being, sick and helpless. That ought to be enough for any of us to know."
Raymer stood watching her as she tripped lightly into the bank, and when he went to catch his car the conservative minority had lost whatever countenance or support he had ever given it.
"She's pure gold when you dig down through the little top layer of harmless scheming for the social Grand-Viziership," he told himself, tingling with the exultant thrills of the discoverer of buried treasure. "If all Wahaska doesn't open its doors to her after this, it'll sure earn what's coming to it."
True to her latest characterization of herself, Margery had a nod and a pleasant smile for the young men behind the brass grilles as she passed on her way to the president's room in the rear. She found her father at his desk, thoughtfully munching the unburned half of one of the huge cigars, and named her errand.
"I want a safety-deposit box big enough to hold this," she said briefly, exhibiting the paper-wrapped packet.
Jasper Grierson, deeply immersed in a matter of business to which he had given the better part of the forenoon, replied without looking up: "Go and tell Murray; he'll fix you out," and it was not until after she had gone that it occurred to him to wonder what use she was going to make of a private box in the safety vault--a wonder that had lost itself in a multiplicity of other things before he saw her again.
For a week after his unmarked arrival in Wahaska, the castaway in the upper room at Mereside made hard work of it, giving the good little doctor with the kindly eyes and the straight-line Puritan lips a rather anxious fight to gain the upper hand of the still unnamed malady.