He picked the telegram up from the floor and read it through again.
"Yes—Hanaud," he repeated, his face clouding and growing bright and clouding again like a man catching at and just missing a very elusive recollection. He gave up the pursuit in the end. "Well, Jim, you had better take the two letters of Waberski, and Ann Upcott's three-volume novel, and Betty's telegram"—he gathered the papers together and enclosed them in a long envelope—"and I shall expect you back again with a smiling face in a very few days. I should like to see our little Boris when he is asked to explain those letters."
Mr. Haslitt gave the envelope to Jim and rang his bell.
"There is some one waiting to see me, I think," he said to the clerk who answered it.
The clerk named a great landowner, who had been kicking his heels during the last half-hour in an undusted waiting-room with a few mouldy old Law books in a battered glass case to keep him company.
"You can show him in now," said Mr. Haslitt as Jim retired to his own office; and when the great landowner entered, he merely welcomed him with a reproach.
"You didn't make an appointment, did you?" he said.
But all through that interview, though his advice was just the precise, clear advice for which the firm was quietly famous, Mr. Haslitt's mind was still playing hide-and-seek with a memory, catching glimpses of the fringes of its skirt as it gleamed and vanished.
"Memory is a woman," he said to himself. "If I don't run after her she will come of her own accord."
But he was in the common case of men with women: he could not but run after her. Towards the end of the interview, however, his shoulders and head moved with a little jerk, and he wrote a word down on a slip of paper. As soon as his client had gone, he wrote a note and sent it off by a messenger who had orders to wait for an answer. The messenger returned within the hour and Mr. Haslitt hurried to Jim Frobisher's office.