There was a great, broad table-desk, piled high with books and papers—a veritable wilderness of books and papers. In a broad armchair, with his back to the door, sat “Old Gudgeon,” as “Scorch” had disrespectfully called Mr. Henry Gordon.
He was as broad as his chair. Indeed, he seemed to have been forced into it between the arms, by hydraulic pressure. Nancy did not see how he ever could get out of it!
He had enormous shoulders, fairly “humped” with layers of fat. His head was thrust forward as he wrote, and his shaven neck was pink, and bare, and overlapped his collar in a most astonishing way.
“Ahem!” said Nancy, clearing her throat a little. She had come inside and closed the door, and it seemed that Mr. Gordon was giving her no attention.
Then she chanced to look up and, on the wall beyond the desk, was a broad mirror tilted so that the lawyer needed but to raise his eyes to see reflected in the glass all that went on behind him.
And in that glass Nancy got her first glimpse of Henry Gordon’s face.
It was really something more than a glimpse. The lawyer was evidently staring at her—had been doing so for some seconds. His great, broad, unwrinkled countenance seemed to have paled on her first appearance, for now the color was washing back into it in a wave of faint pink—a ruddy hue that was natural to so full-bodied a man.
“Come here, girl!”
The voice that rumbled out of Mr. Gordon’s throat was commensurate with his bulk. He slowly turned his chair upon its pivot. Trembling, Nancy made her way across the rug to the corner of his desk.
All of a sudden every bit of courage she had plucked up, was swept away. She felt a queer emptiness within her. And in her throat a lump had risen so big that she could not swallow.