Wing's office on the sixth floor of the Dartmouth was a beautifully furnished suite, presided over by a boy in cut-steel buttons. Wing himself was a dapper little man, a capitalist by necessity only, for his money had been left to him. His one ambition was to collect all the literature in all languages on the game of chess; a game by the way which he himself did not play. “Mr. Wing had gone out to lunch about an hour before,” said the boy in buttons. “Would Mr. West wait?” Harvey, who knew Mr. Wing's luncheons of old, said no, but he would call again in the afternoon. As he walked back to the elevator his eye fell upon another office door which bore the freshly painted legend, “Frederick McNally, Attorney-at-law.”
Harvey lunched at the Cafe Lyon, which is across the street from the main entrance to the Dartmouth. The day was warm for late September, and he selected a seat just inside the open door. From his table he could see people hurrying in and out of the big office building. He watched the crowd idly as he waited for his lunch, and finally his interest shifted to the big doors, which seemed to have something human about them, as they maliciously tried to catch the little messenger boys who rushed between them as they swung.
Suddenly his attention came back to the crowd, centring on a party of four men who turned into the great entrance. Three of them he knew, and the fact that they were together suggested startling possibilities. They were Wing, Thompson and William C. Porter of Chicago and Truesdale, First Vice-President of the C. & S.C. and, this was the way Harvey thought of him, father of the Miss Katherine Porter whose name was at the bottom of the note in the blue envelope. Thompson, a fat, flaccid man with a colorless beard, was laboriously holding the door open for Mr. Porter, then he preceded little Mr. Wing. The fourth man was a stranger to Harvey.
He was starting to follow them when the waiter came up with his order. That made him pause, and a moment's reflection convinced him that he had better wait. He decided that if the meeting of Porter with the two M. & T. directors were not accidental they would be likely to be in consultation for some time, and he would gain more by inquiring for Mr. Wing at the expiration of a half hour than by doing it now. So he lunched at leisure and then went back to the sixth floor of the Dartmouth.