Strange as it may seem, she had never visited her brother’s office on High Holborn before she left her taxi at the door and came up in the elevator to his magnificent suite. Her appearance had a prosaic cause. She had left the country without a penny: a fact she did not realize till the ticket collector, working through the train, came into her compartment and aroused her from a daydream to the realization that she had neither ticket nor money to pay for it. She gave the man her card, and a taxi brought her to Holborn.
She was to have another novel experience. A tall, thick-set man, with iron-gray hair and a strong, attractive face, had come into the waiting room to meet her. She remembered him as the solitary fisherman who had sat fishing for hours on the bank of Ravensrill, without, apparently, catching anything. So this was the redoubtable Mr. Gilder of whom Arthur had so often spoken. She was not especially curious about him. He was a head clerk, and, by Arthur’s account, a clever man at his work; but now that she saw him, she was impressed. He was distinctive--outside of type. The average of humanity you may pass in the street without noticing. It would have been impossible to see Fabrian Gilder once without recognizing him instantly after the passage of years. The jaw was almost square, his big mouth was so tightly drawn that he seemed to be lipless; a powerful nose, a pair of penetrating gray eyes, under straggly, uneven eyebrows; this, and the breadth of his shoulders, conveyed an imponderable expression of power.
“You are Miss Gwyn, of course?” he said. “I would have recognized your relationship with your brother even if I had not known your name.”
It was a little shock to Leslie that she in any way resembled Arthur, for Arthur’s good looks were of a variety which she neither envied nor admired.
“He is engaged at the moment. If you’ll sit down I’ll go along and tell him.”
His eyes did not leave her face. She had often seen in stories the word “devour” applied to an intensity of gaze, and she thought that fictional characters must look somehow as Mr. Gilder was looking. He was not staring; it was the concentration, the probing investigation of those bright gray eyes, that made her writhe inside. If he had been impertinent it would have been an easy matter to deal with him, but he was respect itself. His attitude was deferential, his general manner was friendly. He was dressed very well and carefully, she thought, and wondered whether Arthur’s preciosity in the matter of clothing influenced his staff. The gray homespun, the rather solid shoes, were set off by the expensiveness of his linen. With a woman’s eye she saw that in his way this man was something of a dandy too.
“I hear you are going to live near us, Mr. Gilder?” she said, and he was obviously taken aback.
“Why--yes,” he said awkwardly. “I’ve bought a little place near your house. I love that part of the country.”
“We shall be neighbours,” she said with a smile, but felt no pleasure in the prospect.
“Er--yes. I suppose we shall be, Miss Gwyn,” he agreed.
“It will be very nice for Arthur. I suppose it was his suggestion that you should come down?”
He had a nervous little trick of stroking an invisible moustache, for he was clean-shaven.
“Well… no,” he said. “I haven’t told Mr. Gwyn yet that I have bought the property. I thought another time would be more opportune. I bought it for a song--thirty-five hundred pounds.”
She looked up quickly.
“That is an expensive song,” she said, before she realized an error of taste.
This time he was visibly disconcerted.
“Yes; I--er, I borrowed the money,” he said.
She had a feeling that he was going to ask her a favour, and guessed what the favour would be: Leslie had the uncanny gift of reading people’s minds and gathering their surface thoughts, and in those moments when Fabrian Gilder dropped his mask he was rather easy. He opened his lips to speak, thought better of it, meeting, perhaps, the chill atmosphere of a refusal before it was given, and then:
“I’ll see if your brother is disengaged,” he said, and went into the room to Arthur Gwyn, his head reeling with the vision which had emerged through the gray fog of his drab life.
Day after day he had watched her, and she had never known. He had left his rod and line to steal behind trees that he might see her pass. She was romance in excelsis--the perfect realization of thirty years of dreaming.
It took him a second to compose himself before he turned the handle and walked in, and then he stood stricken dumb by the words that came to him.
