Something in The Day had arrested his attention that morning. (He always read the paper through, page by page, from the city quotations to the last word on the sporting page.) The article in question was not an important one: it was a few hundred words about a party of American girls who were being hustled through London in one day—the quickest sight-seeing tour on record. The account of their doings was brightly written, with a flash of humour here and there; and, you know, it had the "human touch."
Who wrote it? The button moves; pink-faced Trinder starts nervously from his desk in the ante-room, and appears shiny, and halting in speech. He is sent on a mission of investigation, while Ferrol turns to other matters: the circulation department wants waking up. Ferrol actually travelled in his car all the way from his house in Kensington, and for every contents bill of The Day he saw three of The Sentinel. Gammon, the manager of the circulation department, appears, produced magically by touching a button. "This won't do, you know." There are explanations, though Ferrol doesn't want explanations—he wants results; which Gammon, retiring in a mood for perspiration, promises. There has been a slight drop in advertisement revenue—Ferrol has a finger in every pie. "Dull season be damned," says Ferrol to the advertisement manager—a very great person, drawing five thousand a year, commissions and salary, and with it all dependent on Ferrol. In two minutes Ferrol has produced a "scheme"—an idea that may be worth thousands of pounds to the paper. "Splendid," says the advertisement manager. "Get ahead with it," says Ferrol....
In ten minutes it is as if there had been an eruption in every department of the grey building. The fault-finding words in the red room with the buttons drop like stones in a pool, making widening rings, until they reach the humblest junior in every department—Ferrol is back, and the office knows it!...
Trinder reappears. Mr Quain wrote the article ... and Ferrol suddenly remembers.
So the boy has been doing well. Both Neckinger and Rivers approve of Humphrey. "Not a brilliant genius, thank God!" says Rivers, "but a good straightforward man. Very sound."
Thus is Ferrol justified once more in his perception for the right man. His thoughts travelled back once more to Easterham, to the days when he himself was Humphrey's age, to the days of Margaret, and the white memories of his only romance. Strange that the vision of her should always stand out against the thousand complexities of his life after all these years. He saw her just as he had last seen her, eyes of a deep darkness, and black hair that seemed by contrast to heighten the dusky pallor of her skin. A child that was too frail to live, and yet she had inspired him in these long distant days.
It was astonishing to think that she had had a separate life of her own; that she had married and passed out of the scheme of things. She was dead, and yet she came knocking like this at queer, irregular intervals, at the door of his life.
And Ferrol was drawn with a strange attraction towards this boy who was her son; he came as if he were a message from Margaret, holding out her hands to him, across the unfathomable abyss of Space and Time. "Now you can repay," she seemed to say.